I know you are sincere and that you have adopted your beliefs through careful and thoughtful digestion of current events. I believe as I do for the same reasons, and I have seasoned this with careful reading of the Founders' writings. If we judge people merely by the pictures they post without actually knowing more about them, we are not factoring in much more important characteristics than their taste in art or expression. There is also a danger of where we allow the line to be drawn: Is is a photograph of that nature, a photograph of merely holding an assault weapon at "port arms", or is it the possession of the weapon itself?
It is, in my thoughtful opinion, much more important to factor in the general behavior of the person, rather than superficial "clues". For example, a good student can be charged with a felony just because he forgets to unload his Swiss Army knife before going to school. The "no tolerance rules" preempt judicial thought on the part of authorities, giving rise to ill thought out "clues" for handing out severe punishments. When I was in high school I was caught with my trusty pocket knife, and was told to "put it away". The local trouble maker was found with a "switchblade", and was hauled away. The difference was that school administrators could judge by the character of the perpetrator what intent lay behind the deed. That is justice. What is practiced now is simply tyranny, and a version that can be enforced by buffoons.
Freedom was the base of our society, and we assume that it rests on the shoulders of capable and decent citizens. If we are prepared to discard the notion of a good citizenry, then we are obligated to turn control over to some sort of despotism. I just don't accept such a notion. I sincerely believe that the citizens of our Nation are still wonderful people. The way we live has been spoiled by a tiny minority, with a growing number of people who are unwilling to accept the risks of freedom. Freedom entails taking risks.
Thinking ill of people for harmless acts destroys freedom and increases the scope of control of government in our lives. People need to be judged solely upon their physical behavior, not some arbitrary "borderline that you feel" that none can describe or agree upon. To judge as you seem to do is "1984 Thought Police" governance. Your screen name would lead me to believe that you wouldn't accept that, yet your statements clearly indicate otherwise.
Don’t confuse personal disapproval, and advocacy of disapproval, with advocacy of government imposing laws and penalties for things I disapprove of. I disapprove of letting children play with toy guns, but would certainly not support laws prohibiting it. And I disapprove of people posting photos of themselves pointing guns at a camera (i.e. at the viewer), but their right to do so is clearly protected by the First Amendment.
In the case of the school teacher, as I’ve said before, I disapprove of the very existence of public schools, but as long as they exist, I support terms of employment that allow schools to suspend or fire teachers who display poor judgement and immaturity, in settings that can readily be observed by their dtudents.
The whole scheme of bringing government funding into spheres where it shouldn’t be, and then disallowing reasonable regulation of what goes on there, is part of the grand socialist scheme of forcing all of us to submit to a government-prescribed lifestyle, at our own expense. 100% of the taxpayers in a given school district may want prayer in the schools, but the government takes their money and uses it to run schools where prayer is prohibited. I have a problem with that.
The same thing is happening with “private” colleges and universities. The government takes taxpayers money, uses it to fund student loan subsidies and outright grants, making this scheme so huge that almost no college/university can afford to make itself ineligible for this form of funding for its students (simply can’t compete in the marketplace, when all their competitors for students are offering this option), and through this “government funding” link, the government then prohibits the schools from imposing the standards that the administration and board and major alumnae donors want. Instead, a bizarre and constitutionally indefensible mountain of government standards become the norm at virtually every post-secondary institution in the US (e.g requiring the name number of sports scholarships and varsity sports team slots for women as men, even when a much smaller percentage of women have any interest in varsity sports; prohibiting the outright firing of idiots like Ward Churchill, even though they spout bizarre rantings instead of teaching actual information).
Allowing this government-funding link to trump common sense is submission to socialism. In the increasingly rare cases when a public school district manages to get away with imposing common sense, we shouldn’t be objecting to it. If any private school teacher was posting that sort of photo on the Internet, s/he’d be faced with a choice between his/her Internet postings or job (and would never have gotten hired in the first place, if the photos had already been posted at the time of the job application). In all likelihood, the postings are just a particularly tangible piece of evidence of her immaturity and poor judgement that manifest themselves in many other ways, both in and out of the classroom.