I can provide statistics that show more guns lead to more gun violence, not less.

And no one, not one single person, needs an AR-15 or any other automatic assault rifle. It shouldn’t be legal. Period. There is absolutely not one intelligent argument anyone has made for why one would NEED an automatic assault weapon, other than for war.

Two of her quotes that jump out at me:


Well, not if you use the FBI's statistics, you can't!

Page not found . . . Now it says the authors have deleted this site

Damnit... I wrote up a friendly response, and after submitting came to a blank page.

I saved a copy...I just can't upload it here because the .html extension is not allowed.

I saved a copy...I just can't upload it here because the .html extension is not allowed.

If you want to send it to me, I can manipulate it so it can be posted. My email is my screen name @gmail.com.

I'd love to have a copy when you get the chance.

Did my reply get posted? If so, TwizDD - could you do me the favor of sending my reply to her? I'm confident that she will have an email or website, as that Wordpress had several other posts and items for her teaching duties.

Love & Loss in American High Schools
Posted by wileywildandfree1 on February 19, 2018February 19, 2018
FriendshipA couple of teachers celebrating love and friendship week at school
Last week in our school was Love and Friendship Week. We celebrated by sharing messages of love and kindness all week. To get into the spirit, I dressed in flowery garb, braided my hair, played 60’s tunes, and flashed a few peace signs.

be mine

On Valentine’s Day, I wrote students this special message and planned a warm-up that included students making a list of what they loved about themselves. It was important to me to stress the importance of self-love. We’ve been discussing healthy relationships a lot recently in response to the toxic and controlling relationship Henry Higgins has with Eliza Doolittle, the two main characters in George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion. (I’ll write a whole post on this soon!)

They brainstormed things they loved about themselves, shared with their small groups, and then wrote their favorites on our white board to be a reminder to us all for the rest of the week.

boardThis board was full, and so was my heart. I love self-love. I love my students. I love love.
And then, I got home from work and checked my social media. The school shooting in Parkland, FL filled my feed. In stark contrast to the day I’d just spent celebrating love and friendship, I sat reading about the murders, horrified.

I cried, of course. I was devastated. I was also so freaking angry that yet ANOTHER school shooting had happened. But, I noticed something different about my reaction this time. In the past, I would be in horrified disbelief that something like this could happen. Disbelief is no longer part of the equation. The realization that this has become so normal in our society that I am no longer shocked was pretty shocking in and of itself.

Coincidentally, last Wednesday our staff meeting was about emergency preparedness. We were encouraged to keep our interior doors locked and shut at all times during the school day to deter threats. Ever since then, we have been in a modified lockdown in my building. I’ve been asking students to leave as infrequently as possible, because they are safer in my room. When they do leave, they have to knock to be let back in.

The question I’ve been struggling with over the last week: Is this really what we’ve come to? And what about when the shooter moves on from my classroom? Where does he go? To another classroom filled with more of my students?

This was complicated by what we saw in Parkland. Even with locked doors, it’s not enough. Even with regular drills and trainings, 17 people were murdered in yet another school in America.

On Thursday, I woke up sad and struggling. I considered staying home that day, but I knew it was important to show up for my students, and that some stability would be good for them. When students wanted to talk about it, I told them I wasn’t ready, other than to say I was heartbroken and wondering what to do next.

I shared this post on social media about the tragedy and how I was responding to it.

Me

“Today, like every other day, I choose love over fear. I will continue to show up for my students. I will continue to make school a positive and welcoming place. I will continue to tell my students that I love them and am proud of them. I will not let fear get in the way of my love for this work and my love for these young lives. But I will also consider how to take action. How to make our schools safer places for our babies. I have 120 kids. Plus 2 of my own. To lose 17 of them is so unfathomable, I can’t even begin to process the loss. I’m heartbroken. I’m angry. What is it that will end this madness? It isn’t thoughts & prayers. It might start there, but we have to actually DO something. We must.”

In truth, I am still not ready to talk about it, and I am sure I will regret writing this blog post because someone is going to tell me about how teachers should just start carrying guns to school, and how guns aren’t the problem, and how arguing for stricter gun laws doesn’t make sense.

Those arguments are all illogical, heartbreaking, and infuriating for a host of reasons. But I already know that I could argue them until I am blue in the face, I can provide statistics that show more guns lead to more gun violence, not less. I can show examples of how other countries have dealt with gun violence with much success. I can suggest that we talk about how it’s a mental health crisis as a way to deflect from the fact that even if the person is mentally ill, they still have access to these weapons.

I can also remind everyone who says “I guess we should start blaming the cars for the DUI, the pencil for the misspelled words, etc” that it would be a hell of a lot more difficult for someone to walk into a school building and murder 17 people with a knife. Maybe if they really are so concerned with the mental health of the shooters, they’d support stricter laws around who is able to obtain guns in the first place. At the very least they’d support background checks, perhaps?!

They’d probably also support more funding for mental health and education, like having full time psychologists and counselors in schools. Because in my rural district, budget cuts have gotten so bad that our psychologist has to split her time among all of the buildings in the district. It’s pretty hard to get troubled students the mental health help they need when that’s the case. Or when class sizes are so large that teachers aren’t able to build close meaningful relationships with all of the students and better identify students who might be struggling, and get them the help they need.

When people who don’t work inside of a school building respond in ways that seem callous and uncaring, it makes me livid. These students weren’t just names and photographs. They were all human beings with lives that were stolen from them because we have FAILED to act on behalf of our students in American schools. Columbine was 19 years ago in April. Since then, gun violence hasn’t gone down. School shootings have become a regular occurrence. It’s UNCONSCIONABLE that we aren’t doing more to prevent this from happening.

And no one, not one single person, needs an AR-15 or any other automatic assault rifle. It shouldn’t be legal. Period. There is absolutely not one intelligent argument anyone has made for why one would NEED an automatic assault weapon, other than for war.

But what do we do? That’s the question, right?

To start, I looked up which members of congress in my state have accepted donations from the NRA. They will most definitely not be getting my vote in the next election cycle (Here’s looking at you, Reichert, Newhouse, and Rodgers). I will support the national walkouts and protests that are being organized. I will speak up and out against the gun violence in our country, whether I am ready or not. We owe it to our kids. I will not sit silently in my locked classroom waiting for a seemingly inevitable tragedy to take my students’ lives. I will write this blog post, in spite of not being ready to talk about it, and knowing full well that I am inviting a whole slew of angry responses to those who seem to hold their guns in higher esteem than our nation’s children.

And, I will support students like Emma Gonzalez, who are bravely calling BS on the system.

“Politicians who sit in their gilded House and Senate seats funded by the NRA telling us nothing could have ever been done to prevent this, we call BS,” she said. “They say that tougher gun laws do not decrease gun violence. We call BS. They say a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun. We call BS. They say guns are just tools like knives and are as dangerous as cars. We call BS. No, they say that no laws could have been able to prevent the hundreds of senseless tragedies that have occurred. We call BS.”