I drop my kids off at school most mornings, but I also have a job. I do not have the time to run inside and clear all of their classrooms with a firearm—although I am sure my kids and their friends would think it hilarious to watch me doing so with my trusty 28-gauge shotgun, saving them from any hostile quail found lurking under their desks.

The only veterans who have the time to do this, then, are those veterans who are mentally or physically disabled from their service, or veterans who have otherwise failed to transition back to “civilian life” and find gainful employment. Many, I would respectfully argue, are the very last people you want walking around schools with firearms.

But this isn’t the only instance where a policy maker has seen a difficult problem and decided to throw some veterans at it like spaghetti against the wall, seeing if they will stick. Last week, Representative Ro Khanna suggested that we employ the National Guard to fix the backlogs in our ports on the West Coast by helping offload cargo.

The unemployment rate in the state of California is 4.6 percent. Those National Guard members? They all have other jobs. They are teachers, welders, truck drivers, lawyers, nurses, and maybe even school security guards. So we would be asking them to put down tools in one area of the economy to fix a problem that is well outside of their core competencies. Not ideal.