We’re mad as hell, but we’ll all probably keep right on taking it.
Remember when you were a kid? Remember what school was like? Remember the dangers at school?
Your answers will be very different depending on your generation.
Maybe you had duck and cover drills for nuclear attack. Maybe your biggest fear was a bully or getting an F. Maybe you’ve been through an active shooter drill every year since you started preschool.
When I was a kid, we had fire drills and tornado drills. Period. That’s it. That was all we prepared for, all our teachers were responsible for having a plan for. Sure, we still lived with the specter of nuclear disaster and we watched the space shuttle carrying our classmate’s uncle explode on an AV cart at the front of the room, but that was about it. A few small school shootings occurred during the time I was in high school, but nothing that caused administrators to stop the hunting fans at school to stop having loaded gun racks on their trucks in the parking lot.
Writing that, I feel a thousand years old.
A few years after I graduated, Columbine changed the conversation and suddenly everyone wanted to find an answer, a solution, a reason, and a way to prevent such a thing from happening again. Books on violent video games flooded shelves. Zero tolerance rules kept kids from having plastic knives with their lunch and expelled honors students for nail clippers. People were outraged and afraid.
In 2018? We’ve watched elementary students die in classrooms and we’ve done nothing. Not only that, but we’ve continued to support conspiracy theorists who claim those children were actors instead of the lost pieces of parents’ grieving hearts.
The following originally appeared as a series of tweets, so if you read the thread, you’ve read the message:
Every time a mass shooting happens, media and politicians rush to blame “mental illness.” Yet, none advocate for a better mental health system, for better access to care, to therapy and medication, and support.
They also repeatedly ignore the signs of misogyny in case after case, the violence against girlfriends or wives, the rants on MRA message boards, the sense of entitlement and rage on social media. That’s not generic “mental illness.” It’s fairly specific.
This current incident is still being investigated, but we don’t need another data point to see a trend. We have more data points than any other developed nation, nations that also have “mental illness,” but not tons of mass shootings.
Stigmatizing “mental illness” is far from the answer. It makes those who suffer from depression, bipolar, etc. avoid treatment (assuming they have access and the funds). It creates more problems and more suicides.
Gun rights people will argue that all gun control is bad. Yet, again and again, we see people with histories of violence legally access weapons. Last January a man who knew he shouldn’t be armed was told to keep his guns so he flew them to FL and killed 5 people at the airport.
Victim blamers will say “see something, say something,” as though people haven’t called out past mass shooters for various types of violence behavior and ideology. Yet, we still let them buy and own weapons of murder and ammunition.
In what feels like another lifetime, I wrote a paper — intended to be a thesis, but it ended up being an independent study project — on zero tolerance policies, largely a result of school shootings in the 90s, and deterrence, a popular and persistent criminology theory.
Zero tolerance polices do nothing to deter shooters. If anything, the number of shootings since I finished that project have risen. Deterrence relies on the actor fearing a consequence. Too many mass shooters are willing to end their own lives for consequences to work.
I don’t have a real or easy solution. Anyone who says they do is lying. It’s a monster with many heads. That said, banning AR-15s is a good start. No one needs them. Want gun enthusiasts to still be able to shoot one? Make them available at well-regulated ranges only.
A tank is a weapon of war, like an AR15. I’m not allowed to drive a tank on the interstate just because I want one and think they look cool. If I want to drive a tank, I have to find a place that has one, trains me to use it, and let’s me drive it in a safe place, not Main St.
If someone tells you they’re too dangerous to have weapons, take the damn weapons. Don’t let them fly across the country with them. If someone has a history of domestic violence, don’t let them buy guns or ammo.
If your friend or family member is involved in men’s rights, gets enraged if a woman rejects an advance, believes himself entitled to a “hot woman” just because he wants one, consider that a big ass red flag.
What to do with that red flag? There’s the problem. These things can get reported over and over and they just become fodder for the media when the inevitable happens.
We’re broken, as a nation. And we break ourselves a little more each day.
When I was a student, we had:
- Fire Drills
- Tornado Drills
When I was a teacher, at a public high school, we had:
- Fire Drills
- Tornado Drills
- Bomb Threat Drills
- Airborne Toxin/Deadly Gas Drills (for substances originating inside the building)
- Airborne Toxin/Deadly Gas Drills (for substances outside the building)
- Active Shooter Drills (on school grounds)
- Area Shooter Drills (for potentially armed suspects loose in the area)
- A Hurricane Preparedness Plan
- Multiple Lockdowns (thankfully most were due to area suspects and none turned out to be dangerous or deadly)
Students now also live, again, with the specter of nuclear war. Given the recent slip-of-the-button in Hawaii, I would guess many schools now much deal with a plan in case students’ phones warn them of an incoming missile strike.
They also live in a time when they get reprimanded on social media for using social media during a school shooting, but also are told they can get through this by other survivors of school shootings. They live in a time where there’s a huge number of school shooting survivors to tell them on Twitter and Snapchat how to get through a school shooting. What the hell world is this, 2018?
I’m not about waxing poetic about the “good ole days” because there are things that have gotten much better since I was a third grader in Ms. Johnson’s class. There are also things that have gotten worse, but the backlash against that backslide? It’s been a helluva thing to watch. Black Lives Matter, Time’s Up, Me Too, and all the grass roots organizations, groups, and voices coming together to shout down the things going wrong? It’s inspiring.
There’s more work to do.
We’ve ignored tragedy after tragedy. We watched a man rain bullets on concertgoers and forgot it a week later because President Spank Me did some new asinine thing. We let our politicians think Thoughts and Prayers solve problems they’ve been elected to solve while taking money from groups that support the shooters, that defend their rights to shoot up a school or a theater or a park or a nightclub or a train station or a concert or an airport.
It’s time to vote these people out. It’s time for common sense to rear up and scream.
But, it’ll probably pass, us forgetting about Parkland as soon as President Shitforbrains spews Twitter Diarrhea about his next racist, illogical brain fart or as soon as the next man with a gun reminds us to have Thoughts and Prayers.
