With so much buzz on this out there, I’m not sure what else can be said.
Everybody seems to be acting like this is an informational issue. If we could just make the legislators understand the issue rationally, then they’d back down.
The problem is, it’s a political problem. The people who drafted this steaming pile knew exactly what they were doing because they’ve made it politically impossible for it to be defeated. “Senator X voted AGAINST keeping your children safe!!” is an ad that nobody wants to run against.
Facts — like this bill makes nobody safer, hampers access to virtually all school based access to important resources including many legitimate newspaper sites, and serves only as a political chip in the larger game of pandering to the public — will have no place in the cruel calculus intended to plot the path to re-election.
The only thing we can do is ride it out, vote ‘em out, and hope that the pendulum will eventually swing back to something approaching rationality while we still have free public education in the US.
