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crooksandliars.com wrote:At Cary-Grove High School in Illinois, students and staff are participating in a "code red" drill on Wednesday.

"It will include somebody shooting blanks from a gun in the hallway “in an effort to provide our teachers and students some familiarity with the sound of gunfire.”'

School spokesman Jeff Puma said that only a small number of parents have contacted the school regarding the drill (Possibly because, according to one parent, not everyone has received the school notification about the drill.) and it's an even split for and against the drill.

"Substitute teacher Debbie Gummerson said, “Let’s put the kids through some training, and maybe we could save some lives that way, should something ever happen.”'

Parent Sharon Miller called the planned drill "absurd," and thinks shooting blanks in the hallway is unnecessary.

“If you need to run a drill, you run a drill,” she told WBBM Newsradio’s Bernie Tafoya. “They run fire drills all the time, but they don’t run up and down the hallway with a flamethrower.”

Full text of the letter sent to (some?) parents explaining the "code red" drill:

Dear parents:

At Cary-Grove and across District 155, we make your child’s safety our number one priority each day. As a parent, I can assure you that we understand our responsibility to return your child safely at the end of each day. While we take many preventative steps to keep our building secure, we also practice our response should a crisis arise. Some examples include meetings with first responders, a comprehensive crisis response plan, and simulations. We are planning a code red simulation on Wednesday, January 30. We feel it is important to explain the simulation to you in advance so that you and your child might be able to better understand what will take place on Wednesday.

The simulation will take approximately 15-20 minutes, during which time teachers will secure their rooms, draw curtains, and keep their students from traveling throughout the building. Please note that we will be firing blanks in the hallway in an effort to provide our teachers and students some familiarity with the sound of gunfire. Our school resource officer and other members of the Cary Police Department will assist us in sweeping the building to ensure that all students are in a secure location during the drill. At the conclusion of the drill, we will take some time to process what occurred and then we will return to our normal classroom routine.

I encourage you to discuss the drill with your student both before it happens and after. These drills help our students and staff to be prepared should a crisis occur, but it may cause some students to have an emotional reaction. In those cases, your voice may provide reassurances of the drill’s importance. Additionally, we have trained social workers on staff who can speak directly with your child should he or she need added support.

Should you have any questions, please contact me or any member of the Cary-Grove’s administrative team. Together, we can keep our school a safe place for your child to learn and grow.

Sincerely,

Jay Sargeant
Principal

So, this is the solution now? Just call the shootings normal, and make sure all the students who haven't played Call of Duty are familiar with what gunfire sounds like?

I don't care what political stripes are involved here. This is a phenomenally bad idea.

Why exactly is this a phenomenally bad idea?

There are eight hundred million guns in this country. Eight hundred million. Even if congress, tomorrow, repealed the second amendment and abolished all forms of gun ownership, which is not going to happen, those eight hundred million guns will still be there. Are we to pretend they are not? Gun violence kills far more people than earthquakes, tornadoes, fires, or tsunamis, yet schools have drills for all four of those. And knowing what to do if a maniac is running around shooting kids is a hell of a lot better than not knowing.

I fail to see what benefit there is to pretending that guns don't exist. And I further fail to see what benefit there is to assuming that there's somehow a simple political solution to the fact that there exist eight hundred million guns in the country that we're only not adopting because of some imaginary block of stupid people.

I understand and acknowledge the plethora of guns in the US, and also acknowledge that their very presence is something that must be accounted for.

However, is that number of guns, per capita, really a record that breaks all precedent, requiring new and drastic changes in order to adapt? Is the 800 million mark a threshold at which we should merely shrug, say "the hell with it" and make sure children are exposed much earlier to the more nasty aspects of life and reality?

I remain highly skeptical that the number of guns in this country has somehow hit a magical tipping point where the only sensible thing to do is make sure kids know what gunfire sounds like early, so they'll be better prepared. I don't see why that's the best solution, when a better effect could simply be brought about by no longer making background checks for firearm purchases toothless.

Personally, my position on gun control has changed over the past few weeks, now that I've given it some serious thought. I quite honestly don't see the point of banning any type of currently purchasable firearm (including AR's), but proper background checks for gun shows and private sales I feel would neatly have the same effect for far less mess. You may disagree, and you're welcome to debate the point - it's how I've learned and considered most things.

However, I'm afraid you'll need an airtight argument to convince me that kids looking forward to Gunfire Drill Thursdays on the school calendar would be the best solution for this problem.

First of all, school shootings are serious outliers. They are massive attention-grabbing events, and we should watch out for overreacting to them the same way that overreacting to 9/11 got us USA PATRIOT and a plethora of other enforcement abuses. If you're going purely by the numbers, no, this really isn't justified. On the other hand, because it's such a public attention-grabber in this jaded age where the only other comparable tragedy is an attractive white woman being kidnapped and/or murdered, schools have to show that they're being proactive.

On the topic of 'exposing children to the harsher side of life', I'm not for mollycoddling the kids anyway. Children throughout history and throughout the world today are exposed to the nasty side of the world from day one, deal with it, and go on to become productive adults. We don't need to be tossing them in the deep end with ankle weights, but the problem with the protective bubble concept is that the longer they ride in that bubble the more traumatic it is when it pops anyway.

As for background checks on all sales, I'd agree that it's an ideal state. It's also completely unenforceable. Not only do we have no way of ensuring that all transactions are cleared, even if we could Biden himself admitted that there's no serious program to prosecute attempted bad buys under the current system, and no plan for such a program. The entire post Sandy Hook debate is about scoring political points at the federal level, not about doing anything effective to address violence issues in this country. To seriously address violence issues in this country, we'd need to address our social issues overall- health care, mental health, poverty, the War on Drugs, etc. Nobody wants to tangle up with that and the lobby money simply isn't there for substantive change on those topics anyway.

Finally, we are going to have to develop entirely new approaches throughout the world for dealing with matters like weaponry, because the flow of weaponry where there was demand for weaponry was uncontrollable in most non-island states (much like drugs and other contraband can't be kept out) and this was before we demonstrated the capability to manufacture weaponry at home. Now, with the 3d printers? Forget about it, any regulation on that area is going to be pure PR and demonstrably incapable of preventing the bad guys from getting armaments.

We need to make society better.

Also with regards to the 'gun show loophole' and so on, it's never actually been demonstrated where having a background check on private transactions would've accomplished anything with regards to these mass shootings. At best, an expanded background check system would filter some bad purchases out, but there are a lot of avenues to acquire weaponry that would easily bypass the system. Like "I sell you a gun and we don't make it a formal, legal transaction."

Like I said, I'd be perfectly fine with being able to have sales be backgrounded, so long as there's a cap on the fees FFL dealers can charge for running a transaction.

(Otherwise dealers, being good capitalists, will price that shit up to discourage people from buying private.)

But it's completely unenforceable and of marginal utility.

Josh, thank you for both posts - they do highlight the dangers of emotional reaction, especially on my part.

And, you're right - there is no magical solution that will fix this, because it is a symptom of a larger issue than a cause.

As much as I try to remind myself that most news and politics are presented in an emotionally-driven manner designed to nudge people toward a view of an idea, I still fall prey to it as well.

Believe me, I'm right there with you. And I can't help but feel that moments like these are a national failure, regardless of the instrument. The students, the teachers, it's horrific.