My friends at BBC news have announced that “Head teachers in England could gain powers to tackle pupils carrying weapons.”

This measure is long overdue, although what the weapons are to be is not specified.

In my day, heavily armed headmasters were a common occurrence. At my primary school, Mr. Peberdy was seen roaming the corridors with a Magnum .44, and would accost dawdlers with the greeting “Go on, punk, make my day”. He would enter a classroom, and sign his name on the board using bullets from a small AK47 fired over his shoulder. No children were harmed during these demonstrations, but we all knew where we stood. There was some incentive to learn the eight times table, sadly lacking in today’s youth, because no one wanted to go home sporting a gunshot wound to the abdomen and have to explain to their parents why they got it. ‘Pepperpot’, as he was affectionately known, was also a dab hand with the bazooka, and would entertain the older children by targeting those tardy pupils arriving at school at 9:01. How we would howl with laughter, seeing the young children race along the footpath always no more than 4 feet ahead of massive explosions. Amazingly, the number of casualties was small, and there were fewer than 10 deaths each school year.

Discipline at my secondary school was even more severe, although being a trained ninja, Mr. Finch had no need of conventional armoury. He would enter assembly at the back of the hall, and arrive on the stage having completed 6 backward somersaults, only touching the ground once, and having removed, on the way, the shirts of those pupils not deemed to be paying attention – usually they did not even notice that their shirts had been removed. “We will sing hymn number 41,” he would announce “’ What is the sound of one hand clapping?’”. A swift karate chop to the kidneys was just as effective as a knife in the liver, and he would divert the weapons budget to more educational uses, such as the Bruce Lee memorial bonsai garden.