What We Can Do

                   

            Sometimes we feel hopeless in the face of tragedy and violence.  Some people retreat into anger or confusion.  Others just shut down.

            I refuse to adhere to just one reaction.  All of us have different emotional make-ups and the issue of gun violence is very complex.  Politics, religion, sex, and where you reside (a city, suburban, rural area) all influence what position you take on whether gun ownership protects or endangers those around you.

            I can only speak from my experience.  I live in the most populous city in the U.S. and am lucky that I have never witnessed a shooting.  I have also worked for almost thirty years in the Bronx and used public transportation every day.  In the high school where I worked in the west Bronx, there were incidents involving student fights and gang violence.  I sometimes had to break up fights in my classroom or assist controlling incidents in the hallways.

            After retirement, I worked for two years at a live-in facility for teenagers who were locked down because they came from detention centers or the psychiatric wards of city hospitals.  They themselves were often the victims of parental and street violence.  Adults who worked at this facility were trained to respond to students who were out-of-control and almost every day there was an alert on the loudspeaker system for such an incident.

            Despite all of these experiences, I never once felt that allowing a security officer or aide to possess a weapon was a solution to these problems.  And I know I would have felt unsafe in an environment with adults and guns.

            On the other hand, I have participated in many situations in which I felt students were unsafe and I, and other teachers, reacted quickly to these events to protect the students.  For example, I remember one morning when the hallways and classrooms were filled with smoke because of a raging fire in the street outside the school.  The school administration issued no announcements over the intercom to evacuate the students so I took it upon myself to lead my class outside the building.

            Once again it was apparent that adults like teachers, parents, security personnel and even teenagers can make their own decisions about how to protect themselves without the use of weapons to control the situation.  Using a weapon only signifies that things are out of control as evidenced by what happened in Newtown on December 14, 2012 and will continue to happen so long as guns are all around us.