It Happened Again
These get worse and worse every time you hear them. The victims get younger and younger and the shooters more and more alarming. This time it was a six year old that purposefully brought a gun to school and opened fire on his teacher. She survived the shot and hopefully will make a full recovery. Who knows if the 25 year old first grade teacher will want to teach again. These stories involve the worst parts of our collective humanity and yet they involve incredible acts of heroism. The victim had the presence of mind to successfully get most of the class outside the classroom. When she saw that she didn’t get everyone she went back for the rest. She deserves all of the medals and honors that any of us can bestow on her.
I began teaching in 1997. I was a mere 23 year old teaching kids as old as 18 and 19. Looking back, I shudder at how inept I was. I knew the material and did the best I could to deliver it, but nothing prepared me for the challenges teachers encounter every day. Over the years, I have had numerous successes and numerous failures. Yet, there was never a time when I seriously thought one of my students would want to hurt me. I certainly think some of my ex-students were capable of hurting others. I even had one student I worked with that was charged with murder. I’m not sure how that case is doing at this point.
No one goes into education expecting to make millions. My parents would regale us with stories about how they sold glass bottles back to the store to scrape the pennies necessary to buy groceries. Movie theatres would give them discounts and other businesses would as well. It was just understand that teachers would struggle. This is one of those deals where people in both parties talk about how teachers should make more. Obviously, some think we get enough already. I live a comfortable life. I could complain, but I really shouldn’t and can’t with any intellectual honesty. I’m not turning down more money, but money is not the biggest area of concern.
The biggest area of concern is how a six year old can get their hands on a 9 MM handgun and why they would feel the need to shoot their teacher. The rhetorical questions have answers, but none of them are satisfying. The other area of concern is to somehow reconcile the reverence people have for teachers and yet people outside the classroom interject their values and prejudices into it. Either you trust us with your kids or you don’t. I don’t think any kid really wants to shoot me, but I also don’t give them any reason to do it. Some teachers are more confrontational. Some teachers are more strict. That’s not my job, so I’m fortunate. Those teachers may have to be those things because it ultimately helps the kids in the end. I wouldn’t be foolish to say every teacher has the best interest of kids at heart. It’s an indefensible statement. Yet, that is the default position until proven otherwise.
We don’t need door control. We don’t need a cop in every hallway. We don’t need to wear bulletproof vests or arm the staff. What we need is common sense measures that will keep a six year old from having a 9 MM in his possession. It’s just one area where the rest of the world looks our way and scratches their head. We know what’s causing this and we know how to stop it. That’s only if we are being intellectually honest.
Obviously a 6 year old is not going to be prosecuted but certainly the parents should be. They were unquestionably responsible for his getting a loaded gun and taking it to school. According to news reports, authorities are looking at that, but unfortunately, in Virginia it’s a minor misdemeanor. There are many things that should be reasonable as far as gun control, but at the basic level, holding parents criminally responsible for keeping guns secure and preventing kids from having access should be near the top of the list. A slap on the wrist misdemeanor is not going to stop another one of these from happening, and it’s likely going to happen with even more than tragic results.
1And then there’s the parenting in that household. Wonder if he has siblings. Scary thought.
My father, who was born in 1921, told me that at Anna B. Lacey School, lots of kids attended only a few weeks a year, when they were not needed on the farm. Consequently, when Dad was around 1, some of his classmates were strapping farmhands of 17 or 18.
When the teacher tried to discipline one of them, the student beat the shit out of him.
Likewise, and jumping ahead around 60 years, a guy I worked with had grown up in a small burg with a police force of one constable. The only recreatin on weekends was beating up the cop.
Cheap firearms have changed the outcomes, but the level of violence was much, much higher than most people realize.
2I suppose my biggest question would be how a six year old got a gun out of the house?
I have been a nanny, a babysitter and a relative who took care of younger cousins. Who the hell doesn’t go through a child’s backpack and jacket before they are let go from the house?
Through the years I have found a box of feminine protection products, adult scissors, an open bottle of mustard, a lighter
and birth control pills in little kids backpacks. As I was in other people’s homes I had little control of where they chose to leave things. Obviously small children will take anything that strikes their fancy. But the one question I always asked if I was caring for children in their home was— are there guns in the house and are they secure. One house had them and they were not secure. They were proud of that fact. Their children hadn’t shot each other —yet. I didn’t take the job.
A six year old should not be prosecuted for having a gun—but their stupid parents should.
3I’ve always felt that firearms should be regulated like cars and trucks: require a person to get a license which would include a written test on the law as well as a practical test showing an officer you know how to shoot and clean your gun. Also, each gun should have liability insurance. Once there is financial pain, people become more responsible. How to keep guns out of the hands of criminals, I leave to law enforcement, but the gun show sales etc. should be regulated as well.
4One guy boarded a plane with a bomb in his shoes over 20 years ago, failed, and every passenger under the age of 75 STILL has to remove their shoes at an airport screening checkpoint.
Students shoot their teachers, and nothing happens.
5With the metal detectors removed from the Chamber …………
6Which is proof Rick that we really aren’t interested in addressing the problem (at least some of us aren’t). We obviously didn’t outlaw shoes, but we certainly put protections in place.
It should be noted that most of the items that are regulated were not used for their intended purpose. Timothy McVeigh used fertilizer and now we are regulating how people can purchase fertilizer. So, you take something intended for one thing and pervert it into something else. Now, we regulate it. What’s the intended use of a gun? Is it not to shoot things or people? Yet, we can’t seem to regulate that.
7Jim@5:52 am
Indeed . . . . .
8I started teaching in HISD in 1989. My first day I was monitoring the hallway before classes started. No one was allowed in until the bell rang. I saw two young men come in, I told them they had to wait until the bell rang. they began cursing me out so I told them we need to go to the principal’s office. On the one, one of them, a very big one of them, grabbed me by the throat, slammed me up against a locker and choked me. The bell rang, students came in, saw that and cheered!!!! Fortunately one of the police was there and got him off me. Two days later someone threw a garbage can at me from the second floor. It missed me, they caught him.
I did continue to teach, had no more incidents like this, but it gave me thought.
9Bernard, I’m sure parents and students were glad you kept teaching. Teachers are to be admired. I’m wondering what became of the kid that attacked you and what he’d have done with access to a gun. Scary thought.
10I live in a quiet place. We literally have more cops than crimes; 17 cops and about 4 felonies all last year. Both a town cop and a county deputy park at the middle school each morning.
It works, too. No middle schoolers were arrested all year. No teachers either.
(As of the new year, the town cop drives a Tesla.)
It reminds me of the joke about the guy whaling away at the bongos in a saloon. A drinker asks him why. “I’m keeping the elephants away.”
“There aren’t any elephants within 5,000 miles.”
“See, it’s working.”
11As the years go by I’m seeing a huge lack of respect in humans. I grew up on Army posts with a father that was a marksman. He had a beautiful open gun rack in our living room. Not locked, rifles on display, drawer on the bottom containing shells, bullets and handguns. Do you think that either my brothers or myself touched that case? Why? Because Dad told us not to, because Mom said that was Daddys and we were not to go in it for any reason. We obeyed our parents. We respected others property. We were taught by our parents what boundaries were and that there were consequences for not respecting them. As Nick says, we know where the problem lies but not how to find the solution. P.S. My brothers took NRA classes before going hunting for the first time, one still hunts the other doesn’t and I never had any interest in hunting or owning a gun.
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