The Burden of Death in Schools

“It has to stop. And spare me your Second-Amendment arguments. It’s all you’ve got. If you don’t have any other practical solution than MOAR GUNS, then you don’t get to participate in the conversation about what we do next to make this stop.”
— Jennifer Gadd

I’m the son of a teacher, and indeed my close family is full of teachers. I’ve been through school, from day one and on to the end of high school, and my wife and I have seen our two children go through school in similar fashion.

And I am—we are—blessed with the good fortune of living somewhere that guns, or even the awareness of guns, let alone the risk of being attacked and killed by someone with a gun, in schools or elsewhere, has never, ever, needed to be part of our daily lives.

We have fire drills, but never gun drills. We have political arguments about school funding, but never about any form of need, imagined or otherwise, for having weapons in schools.

I don’t doubt for a moment that any single one of our teachers would go to any lengths, do whatever they could, whatever it took, give their life if needed, to protect their students in the event of a school shooting. But I am grateful for the fact that, so far, while for years and years school shootings and other mass killing sprees in America continue to make weekly headlines in our news, they do not have to.

I cannot begin to imagine what living with this kind of prevalent fear feels like to a child, or a teenager, or a teacher. What I can imagine is that it doesn’t help with learning, or teaching. Even if your own school wasn’t attacked this week, then the all too familiar news flashes about massacres at schools just like yours, mass murders of children just like you, must weigh heavily on their minds, and constantly remind them that “this could be you”, indeed that “your turn is coming”. Such a burden I imagine would be a destructive challenge to any learning process. Children in any country deserve so much better than that.

American school teacher Jennifer Gadd has quite a lot to say about the situation:

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