Post by marriedfilingjoint on Oct 5, 2015 9:56:24 GMT -5
The middle school where I mentor is fairly new and has an entrance that was built specifically to keep out intruders. Visitors are buzzed in with a camera and you go through 2 sets of doors with no glass. I wonder how much money went to security that could have been spent on education. The kids I mentor have to take turns with text books.
Post by marriedfilingjoint on Oct 5, 2015 10:13:57 GMT -5
The thing you need to understand about gun owners is that they think the lockdown training is awful and a giant drain of resources, too. The difference is that they don't see this as their doing, they see it as a huge liberal overreaction to something that claims no more than 40 lives a year (their sentiment, not mine). The way they see it, your child has a 3 in 100 million chance of dying in a school shooting and is much more likely to die in a car accident. I think the point they are missing is that these deaths are preventable and no gun is worth a child's life, but I think there is certainly validity to questioning whether pouring time, resources, tears, and childhood into lockdown training is the right thing to do while we figure this out.
I fucking hate what this country has become. That honest to God, every day at drop-off, there is a split second when I wonder if they'll come home.
I am right here with you. I love DD's elementary school but I find myself thinking pretty much everyday at pickup about how unfavorably it is set up for a potential shooting and feeling anxious. The classroom has a large floor to ceiling window next to the door, which is also mostly glass, that opens onto the hallway. You can see the whole room through those and it would take a shooter seconds to shoot out the glass and get inside. There's nowhere in the room for the kids to hide. All the classrooms empty into one long straight hallway (small school), so there would really be no way out where they wouldn't be seen and/or vulnerable. You have to be buzzed in but the front doors are also glass.
I should be able to enjoy the airy and light feeling all those windows bring into the school. Instead I am worrying that they will mean my daughter and her classmates won't come home one day, and I am furious that this is where we are and that nothing is being done about it.
The worst part is that those windows were probably included for another kind of safety - the old style of bunker classrooms allowed teachers and students to be entirely alone and the bad-apple teacher made that unsafe for students. And then the accusations of students made that unsafe for teachers.
I know what you mean. This is one of those issues where I really do doubt the ability to change. Mostly because of all the "responsible" gun owners out there who won't agree to any compromise solutions which impinge on their ability to buy and store weapons that kill people.
Well, and I'm tired to keep seeing how we're all complicit in this. The fuck you say? We're not! I'm doing everything I can fucking do! I don't own guns, I don't vote for gun nuts, I don't belong to the NRA, i vote for candidates who support moderate gun control policies. But I mean until we don't let the superpacs run everything, I don't matter much.
How do we stop this though? Basically every major politician is complicit, right?