I get weekly emails from old Army buddies about jobs available to former military personnel, primarily in the Middle East, jobs offering excellent salaries. Most ads are seeking the crème de la crème, the special operators, or at least those with the advanced combat skills that would be in the resume of any former or retired Ranger or Airborne/Marine infantry NCO.  Playing down the potential downsides of these contracts, such as living in Muslim countries under Sharia law, these ads tend to emphasize the outsized recompense rather than the discomforts

I look at those salaries and wonder why is it we have federal contractors who are willing to pay these lucrative compensation packages for former warriors to assume huge risk and minimal conditions of daily living while, simultaneously, we have school districts throughout this nation that could be employing them and their skills to even greater effect. These experienced tough guys, who devoted their younger lives to protecting this nation and its principles, could well apply all that training and experience protecting the nation's most sacred resource, our children.

May I be so radical as to suggest that school boards all across this country take a hard look at their administrative trees and lop off a few of those really questionable deputy superintendents for this, and assistant deputy superintendents for that? Just what contribution do all these highly paid, administrative dead branches make to the education of the children these boards are responsible for? Do a little math and you'll see that some judicious trimming of these bloated school district administrations could free up some funds to hire teams of those veterans I described above, the millions of potential applicants out there who possess the requisite firearms and security skills to walk the halls of our educational institutions from kindergarten through college, armed and prepared to neutralize any threat to our children. Celebrities hire these people all the time. Are celebrities more essential to America than her children?

A school district wouldn't even need to have highly trained and lethal security teams in every school at all times. Multiple teams could be rotated through all the district schools on a totally irregular and unpredictable schedule. That very unpredictability would give pause to many of the deranged when considering mayhem on a helpless schoolroom. It might drive these crazies to the mall food courts or theaters, true, but I believe right now, in view of last week's horror, that's a better option than an elementary school or a kindergarten, because there is likely someone in those places who is armed. Think about it, mall killing events don't produce the high numbers of victims that campus events do. There's a clear and simple reason for that: the schools are stupidly but publicly announced gun-free zones and the killers, well aware of that, know where they can inflict the most horror before they are brought down.

We are a nation with schools with construction budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars, managed by administrations with similar budgets. With all this tax money being spent to provide our young ones with such excellent learning environments under such expensive tutelage, are there no funds to do this one essential thing: hire, tough, seasoned, knowledgeable professional warriors to keep our children alive? (This Marine father has taken it upon himself to guard his children's school.)

All you liberal parents out there so afraid of guns should weigh this: who is more essential, some totally helpless, multi-degreed, deputy assistant doofus for dietetic planning or some hard-nosed, bad-ass, old pistol-packin' Ranger who, when it all hits the fan, will, by his training and his core beliefs, give his own life to keep your kid alive?