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the musket, although powerful enough to pierce any armor of its day, was also extremely cumbersome. As long as eight feet, and the weight of two bowling balls, they were too unwieldy to be carried by horsemen. The musket was so awkward that it could not be shot accurately while resting on the shoulder, so musketeers used a fork rest to steady the weapon. Eventually, the “musketeers” were rendered musketless and relied on newfangled pistols and trusty old swords.
    Just think of how muskets would have slowed down the derring-do of the three amigos. It’s not easy, for example, to slash a sword-brandishing villain while dangling from a chandelier, if one has a musket on one’s back.
     
    Submitted by John Bigus of Orion, Illinois .
     

 
    Why Don’t Public Schools Teach First Aid and CPR Techniques?
     
    Wouldn’t our world be a safer place if every high school required students to take a class in life-saving techniques? Reader Charles Myers sure thought so, so we tried to find out why CPR isn’t a part of school-room curriculums in most communities. Considering the violence in our schools, the argument needn’t be made that such training would only be usable in the “outside world.” In fact, this issue recently has become a hot topic among educators, particularly because of concerns about the response times of fire, paramedic, police, and other emergency medical services in many communities.
    All of the health officials we contacted felt that CPR and first aid training in public schools could be valuable, but they provided a litany of reasons why we shouldn’t expect to see it in the near future. Why not?
     
         1. Money . Most school systems are riddled with financial problems. CPR training is labor-intensive. While a normal classroom might have a ratio of twenty-five or thirty students per teacher, CPR requires a six-to-one or eight-to-one radio. And training teachers to learn and then teach CPR costs money.
     2. Liability problems . “America,” says Bill Powell, prehospital emergency training coordinator for Booth Memorial Medical Center in Flushing, New York, “is the land of the suing.” What if a student botches a rescue operation? Would the school be legally and financially liable for poor training?
     3. No one should be forced to administer CPR . Several of our sources indicated that although it is an admirable goal to have every student learn first aid techniques, in practice it might not be a good idea to force those who don’t desire to learn or who are incapable of administering them properly. Georgeanne Del Canto, director of health services for the Brooklyn, New York, Board of Education, told Imponderables that good intentions notwithstanding, asking every student to learn first aid would be a little like asking every schoolkid to go out for the wrestling team: Too many students would be insufficiently strong, energetic, or limber to apply CPR adequately, and more than a few would be too squeamish.
     If we required all students to learn CPR, we would be forcing them to learn a technique that they would not be obligated to use outside of school. In most states, Bill Powell told us, lay citizens are under no legal obligation to act as a Good Samaritan (in most states, physicians do have such an duty), even in life-threatening situations.
     4. Motivation of students . Powell isn’t too sanguine about the desire of students to learn CPR properly. Why should they pay any more attention to first aid training than they do to math or history? Most non-health professional students in CPR courses are people who are friends or family of someone who they fear is at risk; few learn CPR out of sheer altruism or an abstract academic interest.
     5. Time . CPR certifications must be renewed every two years, not so much because first aid techniques change but because most students, thankfully, never get a chance to apply their lessons in real life. Constant