Old tales, yarns, and parables. The Pied Piper conjures for most images of children led unwitting by mystical sounds piped for their desire, while the piper exploits their blind youthful trust to satisfy his revenge against their parents. On they dance down through ages as the players change, the reasons shift, and verses added to the music but this constant refrain pipes on. The pawns, the children, pay the price while the players move the board.

Here in our age, we watch as our children, blind in their very real pain and fear, dance in a stupor of agony, as the pipers pipe. They move , they march, they speak what the music, the necromancer of old, prompts they should, all the while they are desperately searching for the meaning of the tune that swirls around them. Who taught them to cower and march toward the predator’s lilting song, begging it for their lives as it waits to consume them in it’s hungry shadow?

We have neglected our children. Our unguarded schools are emblematic of the way we have reared our children in this modern age. Government buildings, elected officials, athletes, movie stars, on and on a seeming endless list are guarded but our schools are not. Our priorities are skewed to lay open and vulnerable our greatest treasure our hope to be targeted again and again by madness simply to feed a political agenda.

A protected school eliminates the issue that grants the pipers of this age their song to pipe, preying on the young fears of our children. But this question still plagues us who see the carnage. Who taught them to cower and run to the predator to beg for their lives?

Or perhaps the better question: Who didn’t teach them not to cower and ask the government for their lives? Parents, adults, citizens too busy with their own agenda to teach the basic principle that Americans do not run to a government, the greatest mass murderer in world history, as our source of life and security. We supposed to be the stuff of “Give me liberty or give me death” and “Live Free or Die!”

But we left them to the government to teach them. Government, the predator, conveniently neglected to teach them that their security was in their own hands, intended to be the responsibility of every free private citizen, a Right defended and explained in the Second Amendment. Instead the age old predator, government, decreed that our schools should be free of the citizen’s defense, gun free zones. The pipers sung the siren’s song, decrying the virtue of their self-reliance, while most of our Nation’s citizens watched in silence, and the government abandoned the walls of our schools.

When the madness struck, the watchmen and the guards had all been exiled from protecting our schools. The pipers have convinced many that protecting our schools is dangerous and the tools to do so should be outlawed. And on they dance to a melody black and craven.

Civilization after civilization have listened, disarmed, and danced their way to slaughter. The pipers declare that the Second Amendment is outdated and ineffective, yet they hide the fact that the Second Amendment was excluded from the schools. Had the Second Amendment been honored in our schools, the madness could have been thwarted. Why wasn’t there a gun in the hands of watchman there to meet the gun in the hands of the madness we all know is in our land?

The song may have new wrappings but the goal is the same. A disarmed people are a controlled people. Those that cry the loudest for disarming the citizen have done nothing to protect our children.

We The People need to guard our children and our schools above all things. Teach them to love liberty, to defend themselves, and mistrust government as a predator, like our Founders did. Then their ears will be able to discern the deceit in the pipers’ flute.