Finally, a Use For Schoolbooks

Every high school class has textbooks which probably get opened in those rare moments when the class isn't learning how to put a condom on a cucumber or studying the homosexual tendencies of our slave-owning founding fathers, and someone has finally come up with a use for those books: Bullet stoppers.

With school shootings a growing concern across the country, a candidate for state superintendent of schools in Oklahoma is running on a platform of defense.

His idea? Storing old textbooks beneath the desks of all public school children for use as shields from gunfire.

In a videotaped experiment, Bill Crozier even went so far as to test various books and various firearms.

Crozier, a Union City Republican challenging incumbent Democrat Sandy Garrett, said he would put thick used textbooks under every desk for students to use in self-defense.

Crozier's experiment began with shots fired at a calculus textbook from an AK-47 Russian-style assault rifle. The shot penetrated two textbooks at once. Shots from handguns were generally stopped by thick books.

"We need to look at protection of young people that sometimes people may think you are a little smarter than everybody else or a higher IQ or whatever," Crozier said. "They need to look at what the end result would be.

"This would be to protect the children in an immediate situation. This is something that any student, any classroom in the country could do immediately," he said.

Given the politically correct garbage that ends up in most textbooks these days, shooting them full of holes is probably an appropriate reaction.

However, some learning could result. You could even create a course of study involving the shot-up books. Physics could look at the forces involved, geometry could study the angle of impact and the amount of deflection, anatomy could study the effect of the barely-slowed slug on the human body, and the social studies classes could study why minority schools were given skinnier textbooks by the white racist school administrators. There are a wealth of opportunities here.