I taught for 25 years. Here’s the scenario that the gun fanatics want me to play out:
It’s a sunny afternoon in Centerville, a real nice place to raise your kids up. I’m analyzing story structure with my kids, when from outside we hear POP! POP! POP! “School shooter!” I mutter between gritted teeth. “Kids, get under your desks like we practiced. I’ll protect you.” I retrieve my blue steel gat out of its box and take my position next to the door. I hear the shooter coming down the hallway. I fling open the door, snarl, “Yippie ki yi yay, motherfucker!” and gun the shooter down with a magazine full of well-placed blasts to center mass. Problem fucking solved. “Get up, kids. You’re safe. We’re going to go home today. Don’t step in the mess, Mr. Woody won’t be able to clean it up for a while. We’re going to the auditorium and then home. Take your books, your homework is due at the beginning of class tomorrow.”
Seriously? That’s how it’s going to play out? No, it won’t. For one (of so many reasons that scenario is flatly insane), had I been Captain Badass at Parkland, that kid I was pointing my burner at would have been ONE OF MINE. One of my former students. So many school shooters are current or former students.
They expect me to shoot one of my kids? Fuck that.
I was (and still am, in my mind) a teacher. I teach kids. I nurture them. I love them. I do not fucking shoot them. But in the minds of these raving assholes, I’m supposed to pivot from Loving Nurturing Teacher to Gun-Wielding Dealer of Smoking Hot Justice and then right back again. “Sorry I shot Nicky, you guys. I know you remember him from last year. But last year he was one of us, a wonderful, if troubled, kid. This year he was a Bad Guy With a Gun. You are all one of us. Until you bring a gun to school. Then you will be the Bad Guy With a Gun, and I’ll have to kill you, too. Now let’s go outside and have some fun. Remember, teacher loves you!”
Here’s what else the sick fucks don’t understand. If you’re a teacher, they are all your kids, whether you teach them or not. Whether they go to your school or to another school. No matter. You see ‘em in the parking lot, in the grocery store, they are your kids. We teach them. We nurture them. We protect them. All of them.
Sam Zeif, one of the brave survivors of the Parkland massacre, told Ali Velshi this morning about his experiences at Parkland and at the White House (“I know we were heard, I saw it on Trump’s little card.”) He made another great point. What if I’m teaching a class and something happens where I think a kid might be ready to whip out a gun and open fire? Pistol in his waistband (do we ever use that word except to say someone has a gun stuffed in it)? MAC-10 in his backpack? Do I drag out Bessie and blow his Bad Guy With a Gun Maybe ass to kingdom come right then and there?
What if I’m wrong? Dead kid, no gun.
What if I miss? Little Janie behind the kid with the backpack might not live long enough to lodge her objection to me planting a bullet under her hair barrette. Oops. Guess I’m writing a letter of apology to her mom. I’m sure she will understand. I was trying to protect her little dumpling, after all.
The Donald Trumps, Dana Loesches, Wayne LaPierres, Jack Kingstons, and all of them have worms in their brains. They want us to turn our schools into armed prison camps, where teachers become prison guards with the right and the expectation to shoot the inmates if Circumstances A, B and C are met.
All of their solutions to solving gun violence start off with the conclusion that There Must Be More Guns. It’s a sick and wrong conclusion. That’s where we start pushing back, before background checks, before measuring the length of gun barrels to determine whether they are “acceptable” or not, before seeing how many cartridges can dance on the head of a pin. Fuck all that. Guns don’t belong in schools. Period. They don’t belong in hospitals, elder care facilities, day cares, churches, stores, theaters, concert venues, you name it. (It crosses my mind that if you can’t smoke there, you shouldn’t be able to bring a gun in there. Secondhand bullets are more dangerous than secondhand smoke.)
I am not shooting anyone in a school, and neither should anyone else.
I have to go cuddle a cat now and calm down. This whole thing makes me sick.
Thursday, Feb 22, 2018 · 5:58:46 PM +00:00 · Black Max
Now I’m considering the idea that flooding the schools with guns is another part of the GOP’s ongoing attempts to destroy public education. Transforming the schools from “citadels of learning” into “armed camps under constant watch by gun-wielding employees” would certainly do the trick.