School Shootings: One Of My Students Asked If I’d Stand Between Them And A Gunman. Here’s What I Said.

 (By Amanda Mayes, Huff Post, 30 May 2022)

 “Ms. Mayes? If a gunman came in here, would you protect us? Would you stand between us and the gunman?”  It was about two months into my third long-term substitute teaching position at my high school alma mater. I returned when my high school mentor was diagnosed with cancer. When he came back in remission, I stayed to continue to build and shape the community that had given me a sense of self in my formative years.

This group of students was still new to me, but I adored them. Sure, they had their moments when they would rather be sucked into a phone screen than discuss the ramifications of gerrymandering, the intricacies of supply and demand, or the Gilded Age.

But teenagers deserve more credit than we ever give them.

They are kind, intelligent, insightful and bold. I was supposed to be their teacher, but I learned so much about myself and the world from them. When they are of age to vote, they will ignite this world with compassion. We do not deserve them, especially when we continuously fail to protect them.

That day, I was running my first active shooter drill.

When I sat in these same desks and walked down these same halls six years earlier, the only scenarios we rehearsed were for tornadoes, fires, and asking a special someone to prom.

But this is the new normal. My students were restless. It was a planned drill ― not always a given, as some drills are enacted without warning. But the notice did little to calm nerves and suppress the reality that we must rehearse for the possibility of our own deaths.

I reviewed my lesson plan, glared at the finicky overhead projector, took a sip of coffee, and waited. No one knew when the principal’s voice would come over the intercom, triggering the drill.

The drill came and went, and melted into the new normalcy of a modern school day, with full knowledge that our paper-thin classroom walls were no match for automatic weapons fire.

But this is not normal. This should not be normal.

We ask our teachers to do so much — to be educators, caregivers, counselors, nurses, peacekeepers, custodians, disciplinarians. And now we ask them to be human shields.

When I stumbled into teaching, it had not crossed my mind that I would have to grapple with my own mortality and weigh the worth of my life against those of my students, despite growing up in this era. I was in third grade when Columbine stunned the world of education. I was in 11th grade when the Virginia Tech shooting happened.

“Yes. Yes, of course I would,” I told the teenager who had asked if I would protect my students.

I made the decision to sacrifice myself to save my students should an active shooter enter my classroom. Part of teaching is believing in the future and believing in a better future. My students must survive to make that future a possibility.

But it is not a decision I should have to make.

With each new mass shooting, the arguments against common-sense gun restrictions appear like clockwork:

“If we armed the teachers, this wouldn’t happen.”

I am an educator. A mentor. A helper. A guide. A light. I will not be relegated to a role of perpetuating this American culture of violence. I will not be complicit in the weaponization of myself and my fellow teachers.

“This is the price we pay for our Second Amendment freedoms.”

Why have many in this country decided that owning weapons outweighs the safety and lives of our children and teachers? How many dead students and dead teachers is your “freedom” worth to you? How high are you willing to set the price to defend an amendment that has been outpaced by technology? How is worrying about being shot at school or a movie theater or a grocery store freedom? Your paranoia and misguided belief that “courage is a man with a gun in his hand” has corrupted the original intent of an antiquated amendment.

We accept reasonable limitations to our other rights. Why is this such a struggle with the right to bear arms?

“Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.”

It is beyond time to limit access to tools used to kill more efficiently. Why are you so terrified of your neighbor that you need an assault rifle? Or feel the need to conceal and carry when you do your weekly grocery shopping? This is a reflection of you — of your need for false power, of your suspicions, of your cowardice — not a reflection of the society you purportedly fear. An AR-15 or other military-grade weapon serves no purpose other than that of destruction.

“This is an act of a mentally ill person.”

Stop equating mental illness as a requisite for murder. Start supporting mental health care. Start normalizing discussion about mental health. Start considering the mental health of those affected by gun violence.

“Now is not the time for politics. Now is the time to send thoughts and prayers.”

Thoughts and prayers comfort those left behind. They also assuage the consciences of those who plan to do nothing, who will continue to support the status quo because it is comfortable, familiar, and politically expedient.

These days I occasionally teach political science as an adjunct at a college. Every classroom I enter triggers the same process: Check the door. Take note of how it locks. Plan how to cover the windows. Find potential barricades. Make a plan. Rehearse.

This process is more difficult at a college because the classroom is not mine. It is used by several faculty members throughout the day. Desks arrangements may be reconfigured. The blinds may be opened or closed. Keys may be misplaced. A first aid kit may have vanished to another room.

Each time the classroom could be different, which necessitates quickly generating a new plan. I have lost sleep running different scenarios in my mind to be prepared for the next day.

Creating a plan in case of an active shooter is second nature now. It is part of the process. Along with preparing my lecture notes and stashing my best dry erase markers, I think of ways to save the lives of my students.

This should not be normal.

Instead of asking teachers to take on the impossible, to accept the reality that they could die doing their job, ask yourself: Who would have to be gunned down in your life for you to act?

Yes. I will sacrifice my life for the lives of my students. But do not let this become my reality the next time I teach.  Do not let my life and the lives of my students fade into statistics.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/teachers-school-shootings-uvalde-texas_n_6293d1c7e4b05cfc269bee94?ncid=APPLENEWS00001

School Shootings: The GOP’s Only Answer To School Shootings Didn’t Help In Uvalde, Texas

(By Alex Yablon, Slate, 25 May 2022)

 In the recent annals of American political rhetoric, there have been few more consequential statements of ideology than NRA chief Wayne LaPierre’s post–Sandy Hook truism that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”  The line has gone from crisis PR spin to Republican Party dogma. But while the “good guy with a gun” mantra has the ring of tough guy common sense, the empirical evidence suggests armed cops and civilians do less than nothing to deter mass shooters.

Look no further than Texas Republicans’ responses to this week’s mass shooting in the small town of Uvalde, the deadliest at an elementary school since Sandy Hook. Speaking to Newsmax, Attorney General Ken Paxton, the top law enforcement and public safety officer in the state, said: “We can’t stop bad people from doing bad things. … We can potentially arm and prepare and train teachers and other administrators to respond quickly. That, in my opinion, is the best answer.”

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Of course, this is Texas. It’s not like potential good guys with guns were thin on the ground in Uvalde. Law enforcement actually engaged the shooter before he got into the elementary school. Indeed, as the Austin American-Statesman reported, it was actually a school guard—a good guy with a gun—who confronted and failed to prevent the shooter’s entry. For years, though, Texas has encouraged teachers to pack heat. In the wake of a 2018 shooting at a high school in Santa Fe, Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott signed legislation that encouraged schools to do exactly what Ken Paxton now demands. It mattered little back then that Abbott was responding to killings at a school that already had two armed guards and a plan to put guns in the hands of teachers.

As Republicans like Abbott and Paxton double down on the same pro-gun proliferation response to every mass shooting, evidence accumulates that weapons are rarely effective means of deterring or stopping mass shootings.  Last year, a group of public health scholars published a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association examining 133 school shootings from 1980 to 2019. An armed guard was present in about a quarter of the incidents in the study. Those schools actually suffered death rates nearly three times higher than schools without armed guards. Similarly, a 2020 review of gun policy research by the RAND Corporation think tank found no evidence that the presence of more guns had any effect on gun violence. Criminologists at Texas State University found that unarmed staff or the shooters themselves are far more likely to bring a school shooting to an end than someone with a gun returning fire.

So-called good guys with guns fail to effectively deter or end mass shootings for a variety of tactical and psychological reasons.  For one thing, it’s actually very hard to shoot straight in a situation like a mass shooting. RAND analysts have found that even highly trained NYPD officers only hit their intended target in 19 percent of gunfire exchanges. Winning a gunfight with a shooter only becomes more difficult when the perpetrator carries a semi-automatic rifle like an AR-15, as the Uvalde suspect and many others have done. These weapons have a much longer range and are far more accurate than the kinds of pistols typically used by police and civilian concealed carriers, allowing shooters to keep responders far enough away that their own weapons will be of little use. The Uvalde gunman, for instance, managed to overpower two officers whom he encountered on his way to the elementary school.

In the most extreme cases, a single gunman with a semi-automatic rifle can stymie an entire SWAT team for hours: Back in 2015, a single gunman assaulting a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood with an AK-style rifle held off police for the better part of a day before surrendering.  The idea that armed guards and teachers could deter shootings in the first place presumes mass shooters behave rationally, weighing risks, when in fact the opposite is true. As the JAMA authors noted, “many school shooters are actively suicidal, intending to die in the act, so an armed officer may be an incentive rather than a deterrent.”  Considering the long odds of taking down a determined shooter equipped with an assault rifle, armed police and bystanders sometimes have difficulty motivating themselves to actually engage at all, as happened so infamously in the Parkland shooting when two sheriff’s deputies apparently hid from the gunman.

So Republicans’ preferred response to mass shootings operates in the realm of fantasy. The standard-issue liberal response—to ban guns in a country where they outnumber people—is at this point not much more realistic. That’s not to say there is no way to prevent a lot of mass shootings, however.  Civil gun seizure orders, known as “red flag” laws, are a promising but underutilized means of preemptively intervening when gun owners show signs they will hurt themselves or others. If a gun owner makes a threat or behaves dangerously—committing violent misdemeanors or torturing animals, for example—“red flag” laws allow family, school workers, medical professionals, and law enforcement to petition a judge for an emergency temporary order confiscating the dangerous person’s weapons.

The laws function like more commonplace personal restraining orders. Many states created civil gun seizure procedures in the wake of the 2018 Parkland shooting (though not Texas), and the NRA even offered limited support for the measures. A 2019 case study of California’s law, passed in the wake of the 2014 Isla Vista shooting, found the orders were used in 21 cases where gun owners had made credible threats of mass shootings. It’s at least conceivable that this law prevented other possible atrocities.

Good guys with guns fail to stop bad guys with guns in the moment because mass shootings are rare, surprising, and unpredictable events. Red flag laws are effective because mass shooters are, by contrast, pretty predictable: They almost always display clear warning signs that they are a danger to society and themselves. The Uvalde shooter was no exception: According to friends, he engaged in self-harm, shot a BB gun at strangers, and expressed a desire to kill. He also posted frequently on social media about his desire for guns. If Texas had the appropriate legal machinery in place, the people in the shooter’s life who had been so alarmed by his behavior might have had an opportunity to act before it was too late.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/05/gop-school-uvalde-shooting-response-guys-with-guns.html