"The Children Are Trained to Throw Books"

I wasn't going to blog about the (most) recent school shooting.  Full disclosure: when the news broke, the Olympics were on and I switched channels to the cable station that continued with Olympic coverage.  I just couldn't watch yet another one, partially because I think I was steeling myself against the rhetoric I anticipated would follow.

It did.  The rhetoric.  And that's what threw me over the edge this morning and why I'm writing.  

First, allow me to offer the highest praise and admiration to the students who have taken it to the streets.  RIGHT ON!!  They are truth tellers, peace seekers, voices of wisdom in a sad society that appears to have become inured to and accepting of gun violence.  Thank you.

Second, as a member of The Clubs and a former school teacher and administrator, my personal opinion is that arming adept teachers would not provide any additional measure of safety against an armed intruder carrying one or more weapons intended to be used on a battlefield.  Resource officers in schools are already armed with a handgun and God bless every single person who is willing to confront a mentally ill person armed with a semi-automatic weapon; it's like bringing a knife to a gun fight.  As for the idea being floated that "lots" or "many" or "tons" of retired military and law enforcement personnel can be hired to defend a school building with multiple entrances, not to mention a couple hundred or a couple thousand students and staff, all I can say is good luck with that. 

When this was pointed out to Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson (who, by the way, according to his website, wants to hear from you) on Face the Nation this morning--the fact that a teacher or any individual with a handgun will be facing down a person intent on doing maximal damage with an AR-15 and might not be able to stop him immediately--the Honorable Governor Hutchinson actually said:

"The children are trained to throw books."

An active shooter training response model being used in many schools is called the ALICE training.  The district I worked in before retirement completed an entire staff training on this model.  It includes ways of slowing down an active shooter, which includes throwing classroom items at the shooter should he should enter the room.  So yes, Governor, the children are trained to throw books but really?  I...just...can't.

As a society, we seek to assign blame for these shootings, simultaneously offering thoughts and prayers to victims and members of The Club.  

As a society, when we ask, "How come the FBI didn't stop the shooter?"  "How come the police department didn't stop the shooter?"  we are asking  law enforcement to morph into the PreCrime unit a la Minority Report.

My spousal unit is particularly incensed at how numb we, as a society, have become to gun violence, its pervasive influence throughout all manners of media.  I was struck by what Dr. Heather Sher of the Florida hospital where the victims of the Stoneman Douglas school shooting were taken (see her piece in The Atlantic.) As an ER doctor, she has seen multiple gun shot wounds.  From handguns.  Not a semi-automatic weapon.  “The high-velocity bullet causes a swath of tissue damage that extends several inches from its path. It does not have to actually hit an artery to damage it and cause catastrophic bleeding,” she wrote, adding that even if the shooter was inaccurate, they could still cause mass casualties.

As a society, we have wildly different ideas of how to do just about everything. 

This is precisely as it should be.

As a society, we appreciate that sometimes, we need to be protected from ourselves because we have wildly different ideas of how to do just about everything. (My mother, God rest her soul, once argued with me that there was a right and a wrong way to use toilet paper.) We enact laws in this vein, recognizing that the law in and of itself will not eradicate what the law's protective intent is.  (i.e. you can't drive while you're intoxicated but people still do...and the beat goes on.)  The point is, when the egregious actions resulting in significant harm to self or others reach some sort of critical mass, our legislative bodies do their job (qu'elle surprise!) and pass a law that pisses off part of the population.  They're willing to piss off people for the greater good.

Here's my landing pad and believe me, no one is more surprised by this than me.

It's in the form of a when, then.

When, as a society, we are willing to defend the 2nd Amendment as a "God given" rather than constitutional right, then children will not be safe in their schools.  (Actually, extrapolating, none of us, gun carrying or not, are safe in my opinion, but we'll stick to the topic for today.)

When, children are not safe in their schools because as a society we are willing etc. etc., then as a society we must allocate resources toward making the schools safer, i.e. protecting ourselves from ourselves.

We can, then, pass bond issues on a local level that will allow school districts to re-tool their buildings in order to protect ourselves against ourselves.  Note to architects: this might be a niche market for you.

Over my storied career, I often fought tooth and nail to keep the buildings open and accessible.  

Because of the when, then, I've changed my mind.

In retirement, I continue to fight tooth and nail for the action items and agenda put forth by Moms Demand Action.  I invite you to find out more and do something.  Will you march locally on March 24?  If not, why not?

 (Articles from this Sunday's New Yorker informed this blog.) 

Cooking:

We are cooking down to the shelves since we're leaving for our Florida Sunshine Sojourn on Tuesday so I have no creative recipes for you, although I do have this story.

After writing about how the NYTimes now charges you to get into the recipes you saved, my friend Karen, with the approval of her daughter Alissa, sent me their family copy of a 1950's New York Times cookbook that belonged to their late husband and father, Max.  That's going in the suitcase with me.

Instead, after all the ranting, how about a photo of the beautiful aftermath of about a foot of snow over the last couple days?