Run, Hide, or Fight

This week at Primero’s school there has been a lot of talk about safety during a school shooting. He goes to the charter school and not the district high school, which has a strong police presence due to frequent and large fights. Sadly, a school shooting doesn’t seem totally out of the realm of possibilities. Supposedly, the school is planning on staging a fake scenario in which each classroom will have to decide to flee, hide or fight. The school had an assembly explaining how each classroom might decide on what course of action to take. Primero, in his teenage hubris, found the whole thing ludicrous and not worth his attention. He described it as a knee-jerk reaction to what happened in Florida. I begged him to reconsider. I had a nightmare just after the news of the school shooting in Florida in which I was trying desperately to get to Primero’s school to find him following the announcement of a school shooting. It  was too scarily realistic.

 

The security guards at his school have started checking all bags coming into the building each morning. There has been talk about installing a metal detector. I haven’t heard of any suggestions to arm staff, thankfully. Yet, I worry like so many other American parents. I worry because no one has any realistic game plan to stop this atrocity from happening again. I grew up around guns on the farm. My father had and still has many guns. My grandparents had a rifle or two. From as young as I can remember my father was very strict about how the guns were handled and who was allowed to touch them. If we wanted, he would teach us how to shoot the guns but we were never permitted to touch them on our own. His guns were kept unloaded with the bullets locked away separately. A few years ago, after completing a gun safety course, my mom got a permit to carry a concealed weapon – I’m not really sure why. I do not own a gun. Even though the city I live in has a higher-than-average crime rate, I have never felt so unsafe to think I might want a gun in my home. On the farm, it was a necessary tool. In my house it would be more of a concern than anything else. Plus, on the one occasion I shot a gun with my father I hated it. I hated the noise, I hated how it kicked and I hated how it scared me. Personally, and I’m no expert by any stretch of the imagination, I think the rancorous arguments about guns is the wrong discussion to be talking about regarding school shootings. I’m not saying the gun argument isn’t a valid one, I just think it misses some of the point when it comes to school shootings. As many people have pointed out before me, the lack of quality, available mental health assistance in our country is closer to the heart of the matter. I think the culture of bullying is also something that needs to be part of the discussion and eventual solution. I just don’t understand what makes someone pick up a gun and use it to kill another human being. How did human life become so devalued?

 

Not only is it a risk to send students to school, where a mass shooting might occur, but so many other arenas have been sites of causalities due to a deranged gunman – churches/religious buildings, movie theatres, outdoor concerts, dance clubs, political rallies – it seems the only place to go to not experience a mass shooting is home! I have no answers, I can offer no solutions. Might stricter gun laws impede those bent on such destruction? Perhaps. But, if someone has that level of hatred in their heart, if they have such a disregard for human life, would that really stop them? I don’t know. Personally, I don’t think arming myself would make much difference, nor do I believe it is the job of any teacher at any school to be trained to take down a gunman in an active shooter situation. I think, in my limited understanding, the solution is something that comes long before a person walks into a school building guns a-blazing. Because at that point, there is no helping them.