Take Ken Pagano, for example, whose invitation to his parishioners to bring their guns to a special event at church tomorrow has made national headlines. Pastor Pagano, shown in The New York Times with a handgun in a holster and a submachine gun in his left hand, wants his church to celebrate their right to carry firearms.

“God and guns were part of the foundation of this country,” Mr. Pagano, 49, said Wednesday in the small brick Assembly of God church, where a large wooden cross hung over the altar and two American flags jutted from side walls. “I don’t see any contradiction in this. Not every Christian denomination is pacifist.”

The Times article notes that, in the interests of safety, Jefferson County sheriff’s deputies (who I am sure have better things to do) will check visible weapons to make sure they are unloaded. They will not ask the parishioners of New Bethel Church in Valley Station for any concealed weapons, however.

“That’s the whole point of concealed,” Mr. Pagano said, adding that he was not worried because such owners require training.

Not everyone agrees with Pagano’s gun-love. The church’s insurers, for one, have canceled the church’s liability insurance for the “Bring Your Gun to Church” event, and have advised him they will cancel the policy at the end of the year.

Maybe the insurance company has the same mental image I have. Instead of yelling, “Amen!” churchgoers will instead fire their weapons toward the ceiling and yell, “Yeehaw!”

Nothing like reinforcing the image that Kentucky is inhabited by a bunch of rednecks. Thanks, pastor!

Seriously, there is so much that is wrong with this event, and the motivation behind it, and it’s hard to know where to begin. [OK, I need to come clean. I've been a member of the Louisville Quakers since 1984, so I might be just a bit biased.]

Let’s start with Pagano’s statement, “God and guns were part of the foundation of this country,” which sounds suspiciously like Christian Dominionist-speak. The Dominionists believe that God especially anointed the 13 Colonies, and the USA, as His special people, and that the country was founded specifically on Christian principles. They believe the USA is a “Christian nation.”

Pagano is only partly right. His own church, the Assembly of God, would probably have judged most of the Founding Fathers as apostates, or at least un-Christian, since a fair number of them rejected the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus. The Declaration of Independence mentions God, but the Constitution does not. In fact, the Constitution and the Founders made a special point to separate religion and governance.

We did not seek independence from Great Britain for religious reasons, either. Revolutionary soldiers and sailors (I have a few in my family tree) may have been church- or meeting-goers, but the Revolutionary War was not a jihad.

Guns back in those days were single-load muskets, the kind that you had to pack with powder first down the barrel before loading the shot or musket ball. People kept them for hunting, not for target practice at the local gun range.

Shooting at the Redcoats may have helped win the war, but the Revolution was as much a war of words and politics as it was a war of military strategy and attrition. Furthermore, the Founding Fathers did not decide, “Hey! Let’s start a new country based on everyone packing heat! No one will mess with us then!”

Then there’s the religious question. I don’t find any references in the New Testament that would suggest Jesus would favor carrying a gun. He said, “blessed are the peacemakers,” and “blessed are the meek,” not “blessed are the sharpshooters” or “blessed are the warriors.”

We can argue the rights of citizens to carry weapons until the cows come home, but no one can deny that a gun is an instrument of violence. Should parishioners also be allowed to bring swords and nunchaku to services? Or should churches hold boxing matches just before the altar call?

I just can’t twist my mind around the inherent contradiction between packing a gun and going to church at the same time. Pagano, however, sees no problem in it. In fact, he apparently sees it as a battle against some formless conspiracy .. against what, I don’t know.

“When someone from within the church tells me that being a Christian and having firearms are contradictions, that they’re incompatible with the Gospel — baloney,” he said. “As soon as you start saying that it’s not something that Christians do, well, guns are just the foil. The issue now is the Gospel. So in a sense, it does become a crusade. Now the Gospel is at stake.”

Yeah, the Gospel of St. (Dirty) Harry.

Two Mississippi school districts have banned teachers from texting their students — to avoid any hanky-panky with the kids. Meanwhile, a small school district in Texas has decided to allow its teachers to pack heat while on the job — for protection from wacko students.

Sad, sad commentaries on the American educational system …

According to Associated Press and ABC News reports, the two Mississippi districts (Lamar County, southeast of Jackson, and Lauderdale County, east of Jackson) imposed the new restrictions on teachers following the convictions on sexual misconduct charges of two teachers from elsewhere in that fair state. School district attorneys made the recommendations, apparently.

While maybe well intentioned, it’s a stupid restriction. Texting, like dancing, does not necessarily lead to sex. Cracking down on teachers and students texting each other will not eliminate teacher-student liaisons. After all, that kind of “extra-curricular” activity happened long before Web 2.0 — or for that matter, the Bell telephone system — became a reality. Some teachers — myself included — use instant messaging for far more boring reasons, like communicating with students about homework — hardly ideal foreplay.

A related controversy involves teachers and social-networking sites. A CNN story suggests some legislators (gods forbid!) are also looking at preventing teachers and students from associating with each other on Facebook, MySpace and similar sites, for the same bass-ackwards reasons as the Mississippi texting bans.

Rather than trust teachers’ professional judgments, officials would rather make the wall between teachers and students even taller and more impenetrable. CNN quotes a teacher who said he uses his social-networking page to facilitate communication with his students about assignments, in essence an on-line extension of the classroom.

The ABC News story quotes a somewhat alarming statistic, that between 2001 and 2005 there were 2,570 educators charged with sexual misconduct, but it fails to put that number in context. According to the US Bureau of the Census, there are 6.8 million teachers in the United States. Of those, 2.6 million teach at the elementary and middle school level, and the rest teach pre-school, kindergarten, high school and postsecondary classes. So, let’s assume the 2,570 known sexual misconduct cases were evenly spread across each of the five years. On average then, during that period there were about 500 teachers caught fooling around with students nationwide. That’s 1 in every 13,600 teachers each year, or in others, little Susie and Billy are probably perfectly safe.

I would bet you that most of those cases did not involve texting or social-networking sites. Maybe electronic communication could have facilitated student-teacher liaisons, but pulling the plug would not have prevented them.

One of the hardest aspects of teaching is maintaining a proper social distance from your students. There is a wide range of acceptable teacher-student relationships, from the strict disciplinarian to the more easy-going, collegial kind. Some teachers fall off either end of the scale. Either they act like feudal lords, with complete control of their students’ minds, or they act like pals — overaged teenagers. Then there are the distinct few who either prey on students for sex or who allow themselves to get sucked into inappropriate relationships with their kids.

Those few are going to cross over the line with or without text messaging or the Web.

As for the Harrold, Texas, school board decision to allow teachers to carry concealed weapons … well, it’s Texas. They do things differently there. With the kind of bass-ackwards reasoning fostered by the National Rifle Association, the folks there want to prevent school shootings by arming their teachers.

The small community of Harrold in north Texas is a 30-minute drive from the Wilbarger County Sheriff’s Office, leaving students and teachers without protection, said David Thweatt, superintendent of the Harrold Independent School District. The lone campus of the 110-student district sits near a heavily traveled highway, which could make it a target, he argued.

“When the federal government started making schools gun-free zones, that’s when all of these shootings started. Why would you put it out there that a group of people can’t defend themselves? That’s like saying ‘sic ‘em’ to a dog,” Thweatt said in a story published Friday on the Fort Worth Star-Telegram’s Web site.

“These shootings” refers to those cases where students entered schools with enough artillery to quell a small-scale border incursion in Afghanistan. Unless Harrold teachers are packing AK-47s or Uzis, I somehow doubt a pistol in a shoulder holster is going to slow down any determined student shooters, in the highly unlikely event one of them visits Harrold, Texas.

[Statistics, folks. How many school shootings in how many years? A few. How many schools with no shootings? Hundreds of thousands. Jeez, can't people count?]

So, here’s the moral of these two little developments in US education. It’s not appropriate to talk to your students on-line, but it’s perfectly OK to shoot them. Remember those bywords, teachers, as you start the new year.