Stand

Last week, about 50 EHS students joined hundreds of thousands of their peers across the country by walking out of their classrooms for seventeen minutes in honor of those killed last month in Parkland, Florida. These students, along with others like them, have been both vilified and celebrated. Depending on your vantage point, they are either misguided pawns of a leftist plot to destroy the second amendment, or they are the vanguard of a movement that has finally come of age.

As a high school teacher with two grade-school children, I have a special interest in these events. These are our students; these are our kids, and, as such, I would ask that we more seasoned Americans keep in mind that an entire generation of young people has gone to school with this threat in the back of their minds.

I was teaching at Altamont Grade School in the spring of 1999 when news of Columbine seeped into the classroom. Ever since that tragedy two decades ago, many policy makers and pundits simply walked backwards into their respective ideological corners and began shouting.

For example, many commentators remind us that society is broken. Guns are not the problem, we are told, people are the problem, and, until we fix people, we shouldn’t expect much progress. Gun control—of any kind—is not only unconstitutional and unpatriotic, it just won’t work. Criminalizing guns will mean that only criminals will have guns.

And there is logic to that argument. Society is broken. Equally important, the overwhelming majority of gun owners are responsible, law abiding citizens, and considering our nation’s success with prohibition, trying to take away those rights would end badly.

However, others will often point out that the nature of assault rifles in particular make them too dangerous for the general public to own. These are weapons designed not for hunting or even target practice but for killing many people in a short amount of time. What legitimate purpose does such a tool pose outside of the military? And another thing, we are told, according to many polls, most Americans are open to the idea of some restrictions when it comes to purchasing such a weapon.

Those are the talking points for both sides and have been as such for years. So, let’s pause for just a bit and switch gears.

Imagine you are a patient dying of a disease, and one doctor comes in and tells you that he has the cure. The only caveat, however, is that he will need to fly a rocket ship to Jupiter in order to collect the materials for the drug.

How optimistic are you?

Now imagine another doctor walks into your hospital room, and this doctor tells you that she has the cure, but she will need to dig a hole to the center of the earth to collect the materials. Now how do you feel?

For all practical purposes, both doctors have told you that you’re going to die, right?

That’s what the school shooting debate is beginning to sound like: two opposing “solutions” that are so far-fetched that they may as well be terrible jokes.

Folks, guns are not going anywhere. If the feds didn’t come after the guns after twenty grade school kids were massacred while a liberal Democrat lived in the White House, what is the likelihood of it happening now? And blaming “bad parenting” for school shootings? How do you even begin to quantify “bad parenting?” How do you legislate away “bad parenting” like it’s an outdated trade embargo?

 Perhaps I’m oversimplifying a bit, but are you at least beginning to understand why our students are so frustrated, confused, and scared? Do you get why many of them walked out of school last week?  Twenty years of high profile school shootings, and we’re still talking about gun control? We’re still talking about “fixing” society, like it’s some piece of porcelain that’s been knocked off a shelf?

How about we meet in the middle and treat our students—our children—at least as well as how we treat our jewelry? I understand it’s not always a pleasant idea to have armed personnel patrolling our schools, but at least it’s something. At least it’s an acknowledgement that the issue—however statistically unlikely it really is—merits serious focus. After all, nearly all school shooters are mentally ill young men, but you have to be a special kind of crazy to walk into a building guarded by someone as well armed as you. At the very minimum—and I know this sounds crass but this whole thing is crass—we would suffer fewer casualties, as the most recent school shooting in Maryland suggests.

In the meantime, while we wait for policy makers to discuss ideology at the expense of solutions, the rest of us, particularly those who actually work in a school five days a week, will continue to focus on the immediate task at hand: trying to give our students a good reason to walk into the building.