My wife, who is a preschool teacher, spent her entire Saturday morning in a preparedness training session concerning gun violence. She went through a variety of scenarios about parents holding children hostage or enraged gunmen storming her daycare.
My children regularly in their school have 'lockdown' drills. Our high school this year will have new, stricter entry policies to reduce the possibility that gunmen or other undesirables are able to gain access to the interior of the building.
Every month at our bus driver monthly safety meetings we go over the many terrible possibilities that could happen on our buses. We have lifesaving training that includes gunshot wound packing, violence de-escalation techniques, and other types of scenarios that hopefully we will never have to use.
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In the 1950s school kids across America were taught the technique of 'Duck and Cover'. In the case of a nuclear detonation, it was thought that such outcomes might save a few lives, and in fact there is some evidence that having even the slightest shield from the radiation might well reduce the exposure and save a life. Such techniques are today widely ridiculed, with the idea that 'if a nuclear explosion happens, what's the point of getting under a desk'? Indeed, it seems quite ridiculous...better to not have a nuclear explosion. Somewhere along the way as a nation things de-escalated to the point that I don't know that kids have to worry about nuclear annihilation.
But today, since the time that they were very small, my kids have been well aware that it's possible some nutjob with an automatic weapon could come in and start blasting away killing them or their teachers or classmates. They live with this possibility just as much as I grew up doing tornado drills in Oklahoma.
It's a sad statement on our world that these realities are so possible today. We live in a world of such horrific and sustained violence even as there is such an unwillingness to get to the causes of violence. We'd rather have drill after drill to prepare us for their eventuality, and many believe that the best defense is a good offense. Surely, it is thought, that teachers and citizens packing heat will deter the violence. Give everybody a gun, they say, and we'll all be safer.
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Today a guy walked into a WalMart in El Paso, Texas and killed at least 20 people.
