This week at school I had a fantastic-followed-by-frightening experience. Hence I’m posting this political message about gun control.
I was working with two 1st Grade teachers in their classrooms one morning. Let’s call the teachers Ms. Lincoln and Ms. Washington.
In Ms. Lincoln’s class, kids were writing “extended” sentences in which one sentence had to answer all of these questions:
- Who?
- Doing what?
- Where?
- When?
- Why?
The students seemed to work intently as they wrote in their notebooks. When it was time to read aloud what they had written, many raised their hands and we heard startling and charming samples of their work. Two different students wrote these about their teacher:
- Ms. Lincoln will be running outside at 1:01 because she does not want to be late.
- Ms. Lincoln is doing her work at 10:15 because she needs money to buy a house to live in and pay her light bills next month.
Not only charming, but impressive for 1st Graders in October!
I went across the hall to Ms. Washington’s class, where the students were independently reading free choice books. Kids were scattered about on rugs, on bean bag chairs, at desks and tables, reading quietly. It seemed very pleasant. I joined Ms. Washington, who sat at a table in the corner working with three children as they read their books and magazines.
One boy was reading a page from a booklet titled Incredible Invertebrates (published by Scholastic). He read the following text aloud, with quiet confidence and no help from his teacher:
- Tarantulas are arachnids, a group of invertebrates that include spiders and scorpions. Tarantulas live in warm places in North and South America, as well as Africa. Tarantulas’ bodies are covered with special bristles called urticating hairs that they flick to defend themselves. These hairs are itchy and tell predators to back off. Tarantulas don’t spin webs to catch their dinner. Instead, they sneak up on prey and inject a protein that dissolves its insides and slurp it all up!
As in Ms. Lincoln’s class, I was impressed to see a 1st Grade student succeed at what seemed like a high-level challenge.
The boy, who enjoys reading about spiders, and Ms. Washington started to discuss what the text meant when the school’s loudspeakers announced we were having a “soft lockdown” drill. Instantly, the children got up from their reading spots and congregated in the corner of the room that couldn’t be seen from the window in the door to the hallway. Mrs. Washington closed and locked the door, turned out the lights, and joined the children and me.
The purpose of lockdown drills is to prepare a school in case an intruder enters the building with intentions to harm one or more people. Ideally, the intruder(s) would walk down a hall and find empty, dark and locked classrooms. The intruder(s) would peer through each door’s window, see nobody, and walk away.
The kids, Ms. Washington and I sat in silence for the duration of the drill. Some kids seemed nervous. Some seemed goofy, which may have been a way to deal with their nervousness. I was petrified.
Over the past few years, there have been many awful school shootings across the country. I reacted with horror, sadness and outrage every time another one occurred, but it wasn’t until I was sitting in a silent, darkened classroom with 25 great 1st Graders and their terrific teacher that the state of out-of-control gun danger really hit home with me. Kids shouldn’t be in such danger when they go to school. They shouldn’t feel frightened.
Hence, I join with other Americans who are voicing their demands for a change in gun ownership policies and practices in the USA.
For example, I applaud Hillary Clinton when I read this about her in the NY Times:
Hillary Rodham Clinton has been campaigning on the [gun control] issue for weeks in gun-friendly primary states, offering no apology for embracing a topic that national Democratic candidates had avoided for the last 15 years, either because they thought progress was hopeless or because they feared giving the gun lobby political ammunition to use against them. She is proposing a series of strong gun safety steps that, while surely doomed in the current Republican Congress, have the virtue of forcing a national debate on a grave public health issue.
…
Her proposals would revive the ban on military-style assault weapons that Congress let expire in 2004; close lethal loopholes in gun buyers’ background checks to include Internet and private sales; repeal the notorious law protecting the gun industry from damage suits by victims of gun violence; and withhold firearms from people accused of being domestic abusers.
Similarly, I applaud the current and former New York City mayors for holding gun dealers in other states responsible for selling guns that wind up in criminal hands in New York.
Click here for a recent NY Times story about the “iron pipeline,” whereby gun runners buy guns in the South and transport them north to sell on the streets of New York.
Article excerpt:
The authorities say that [gun runner] Mr. Bryant, who was charged on Thursday with 51 counts of weapons sales, ran a prototypical operation: taking orders for guns from New York City — no questions asked — before obtaining weapons from South Carolina, North Carolina and Tennessee, and then returning to his native Brooklyn, where he kept an apartment.
…
The weapons that Mr. Bryant was charged with trafficking included firearms from the South that are routinely seen on tables at news conferences in New York City: four AK-47s, a submachine gun, a rifle and 44 handguns of varying calibers.
Perhaps it would be nearly impossible to enact strong anti-gun laws in the entire USA at this time, although we should keep trying. But if individual states, such as New York, can drastically reduce the number of guns within its borders, especially in the hands of criminals and the mentally unstable, and show a corresponding drop in violent crime, then maybe the rest of the country will follow suit.
When I was a child we had bomb drills at school during the Cuban missile crisis. Schools stopped doing that. When can we pull back on the need to practice “soft lockdowns” because the threat of gun violence has gone away?
Click here for the source of this gun-bust photo.
