My head tells me to not get my hopes up for any changes at all in gun regulations or increased safety measures regarding firearms, but my heart contains some vague hope that the image of heavily armed police standing yards from kids being slaughtered and bleeding to death and not swiftly engaging with the madman in Uvalde might produce something...
How can anyone deny the harsh reality that fallible and confused humans, even armed to the teeth and trained to respond to school shooter, will often (usually?) fail to perform very well.
All that horse manure about arming teachers and offering a Rambo in every classroom has been exposed as the worst sort of mythology. And don't get me started on turning school buildings into maximum security institutions. As if a fortified door and one bored dufus with a gun would ever keep a determined nut case out of a building.
I don't totally blame the cops who cowered rather than stepped up. They were scared. They were not 100 percent sure what they were getting into. They have their own families and no one woke up that morning hoping to be wounded or killed at an elementary school. On the other hand, that is the job they took on.
People will be fired. Lawsuits will linger for months to come. Children and families and the entire community of Uvalde will never be the same. Prayers will only comfort the ones saying prayers, assuring them that they are doing the right thing. Ministers will continue to claim that God has a plan and that if we only have faith, all will be well.
No wonder church attendance has fallen to very low levels. Anyone with a brain must realize that if God is interested, he has delegated any fixes or changes to humans. We are on our own, and always have been.
I was hoping I would maybe hear a minister offer some practical advice about how the Lord would prefer that everyone run like hell when they hear gunshots in the building. He gave us legs, after all. It's only school officials who think it's a great idea to hunker down in little classrooms and wait for death.
I remember my first year teaching at Heritage HS, in Littleton, just three years after Columbine, which occurred a dozen mile west of our school. I heard from officers who were there. I heard from fellow teachers who had transferred to Heritage.
The school had small, infrequent windows and looked like a WWII bunker. I happened to teach in a small addition to the original monument to cement and brick and there was a single, large window overlooking a neighboring park.
One officer privately told me that if it were him, he would find any way he could to break that window and take my students and run into the woods. We practiced "sheltering in place," but my private plan when the gunman came was to toss a desk through the window and run like hell.
Maybe what schools really need are MORE doors and windows and ways to escape. Would there be chaos from that? Um, yeah. Could the gunman escape along with the running students? Sure.
But should our first thought be how to clean up the scene of the massacre and get accurate counts of who lived and who died. Or should it be to get away?
I sat in the choir loft yesterday planning escape routes (instead of listening to the vapid sermon, which contrasted murdered children with the joys of spring... or something). The church has no armed guards and I wouldn't trust most of those in attendance to take care of things with their concealed weapons, should there be any. Churches are full of, well, old people.
I did think we would be a juicy target for anyone interested in racking up a large body count.
I saw a provocative column yesterday that boiled down to gun safety advocates adopting the same sort of long-game tactics as the anti-abortion zealots. What if protesters stood on the sidewalk outside gun dealers, holding signs like, "Shame on you"? And then returned every day, as protesters do around Planned Parenthood clinics?
What if a significant number of Americans decided to quit trying to fix everything -- the true Achilles Heel of the Democratic Party -- and instead embraced single-issue voting? What if voters began voting for anyone willing to increase gun safety, no matter the party and no matter how much or little they agreed with other positions?
You are likely thinking like me: protesters around gun shops would need their own body armor and would be courting death... something those protesters around abortion providers don't fear. After all, it's rarely the progressives wielding the guns and murdering innocents.
I haven't quite worked out some "unified theory" of how to improve America, but I suspect that reducing gun violence is connected to a lot of our anti-woman, anti-child (other than those still in the womb), anti-immigrant, anti-"other" language and action.
The most rabid anti-abortion people are single-minded, and they can overlook voting for a repulsive, obscene jerk if there is a chance to advance their cause. It's appalling, but logical.
My questions: "Where are the repulsive, obscene jerks on the Democratic side? The ones who can get votes, even if for the wrong reasons, and then relentlessly push for a reduction in gun violence?"
If the point is to make progress, focus is important.
I fear that next week progressives will yank their attention to any one of the many other issues we are facing, and then they will fatalistically place gun violence back among so many issues... and life will just go on.
Democrats have the right ideas, overall, but they don't have the willpower to get things done. I have heard all the excuses and about Republican opposition to, well, everything.
Time to get pragmatic and to show people how government and civility can move us forward, however imperfectly.
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