It’s hilarious – correction, it’s pathetic – that the gun lobby’s Republican puppets have responded to the latest mass shootings by floating the bright idea that teachers should be locked ‘n’ loaded in order to deter future Second Amendment marauders.

But having written about gun violence for so long, I’m burdened with a long institutional memory. When the puppets’ proposal was pitched the other day, I asked myself, “Gee. Where I have heard that before?”

The answer: Eleven years ago.

How did I remember that? Because I wrote about it 11 years ago.

Many mass shootings ago, I was already exhausted with rage. So I tried some gentle irony. Here’s what I wrote on March 3, 2011:

The gun lobby currently supports a bill, introduced in Arizona, that would allow college professors and students to bring guns to class. If that bill passes, I will be so envious. When I’m not columnizing, I happen to be a college professor who’s far away from Arizona. Alas, unless Pennsylvania follows suit some day, it appears that I will forever teach unarmed, denied the right of rugged individualism.

A guy can dream, though. Creating a classroom atmosphere that blended civil discourse with hair-trigger vigilance would be exciting. Some skeptics insist that guns have no place in academia, but I say there is no good reason why I shouldn’t be able to talk and consult my notes and post material on-screen and keep the kids engaged and moderate their discussions while also aiming a locked and loaded Glock at the door just in case the next person crossing that threshold might be packing heat with malice aforethought, which I would of course be trained to deduce.

A gun would also allow me to better connect with the kids. It’s a drag being seen as an old fogy. On Tuesday – true story! – I crossed paths with a favorite student who was bopping along to music emanating from his ear buds. I asked what he was listening to. He shrugged dismissively: “Some techno group. You probably never heard of ’em.”

Well, with guns in class, you can bet things I’d be hipper. I could say to this same kid, “Hey, check this out, you like my Glock?” And he could say, “Whoa. Dude. Sweet. But I think my Beretta has you beat.” And I could say, “The Beretta is nice, sure. But mine has short recoil and structural plastic.” And he could beam in admiration and say, “OK, like, prof? You are the man!” And of course we would immediately bond, if I wasn’t busy casing that classroom door.

Granted, there is always the chance that some innocent might turn the knob and gain unauthorized entry. Consider, for instance, your typical lost student who stumbles in and announces, while checking her texts and e-mails at the same time, “Yeah, like, is this the Romance Languages course?”

No problem! We in the class would quickly ascertain the nature of the threat, put this interloper in our gun sights, and unleash a cacophonous yell: “Drop the latte! Do we look ‘romantic’ to you?”

I believe this is what one of the gun lobby’s politicians was talking about the other day when he declared that professors and students should be “prepared to take action.” But he may not even realize that a gun would also enable a professor to patrol his territory for the purposes of law and order.

Say, for instance, a professor discovers that one of the students with an open laptop is busy shopping for boots on Gwyneth Paltrow’s website, while texting across the room on her iPhone to a grieving guy who just found out that his girlfriend broke up with him, like, two minutes earlier on Facebook. A professorial gun at such a moment might prove to be a valuable enforcement tool (“you two have five seconds to log off!”), although there is always the chance that a student might video the incident and put it on YouTube.

Of course, all this deadly hardware might theoretically pose a problem. If gunplay erupted at my unsecured classroom door, and everyone started shooting, and the campus cops came running, how would the authorities sort the good guys from the bad?

I have a solution: On the first day of class, I would distribute, in addition to the syllabus nobody reads, a box of white baseball caps, and I would require that they be worn at all times. That way, in the wake of a crisis, the responding cops could quickly spot the good guys and refrain from shooting them – assuming that the bad guys show up with a darker cap color.

I do worry that some high-spirited student out in the hall might pop a balloon or a paper bag, and thus invite a hail of bullets through the wall. But I assume the gun lobby has anticipated such a scenario, and that the educators will explain, to the complaining parent, that, in the real America, this is the price one must pay for a more manly muscular exercise of academic freedom.