Arms Control, Then and Now

When I was in junior high school, back in the late sixties, I took a required first aid course.  The premise of the course was built around the notion that if one was prepared, one could survive a nuclear war.  The course included training on what to do for the sickness induced by radioactive fallout, how to bandage compound fractures caused by falling debris, what sorts of supplies to keep in a basic survival kit, and so on.

The course was designed to augment the drills we periodical had.  Sometimes we were required to take cover under our desks, at other times we were marched down to the school basement to spend a few minutes in the school's fallout shelter.  It was dark, and dank, and stocked with many boxes of dried foods, bottled water, and the first aid kits we were learning how to use.

I suppose such training was worthwhile at one level.  After all, knowing some first aid skills can come in handy under a wide array of circumstances.  But the notion that we could survive a nuclear attack, when my town was less than twelve miles from a large Air Force Base and a large Naval Shipyard, was ludicrous. Fortunately, the powers that be came to realize that in the interest of saving lives it was far more effective to work towards scaling down the number of nuclear weapons scattered around the globe.  Far more effective, and far more realistic.  That work, of course, is not complete.  But the shift in strategy has made the world a bit safer.

I thought about all that when I heard about the introduction of the Stop the Bleed campaign being introduced in Florida's schools.  The basic idea is to teach teachers and students how to deal with gunshot wounds, how to minimize the blood loss from such injuries.  This, of course, coupled with ongoing mass shooter drills that are being held in our schools as well.

Teaching such skills may indeed have some real value, and it might save some lives.  And that is worthwhile.  But I can't hep but wonder if it is also a way to avoid the real issue.  Just as there were (and are) too many nuclear weapons, so too there are too many guns, especially automatic weapons.  And until we get the proliferation of such weaponry under control, we will be finding ourselves bandaging more and more wounds, losing more and more lives, living with more and more fear.