This just took my breath away, and not in a good way.

[Arkansas Granny]

Link to tweet

?s=20


Jen 🕳🚶🏻?♀️✌🏼❤️🤘🏼
@ITMFA_NOW
Overheard in my living room where my daughter and her friend are having a sleepover: when do you think it will happen at our school? who do you think it would be? what would you do? I would die if you died.. I fucking hate this so much... my heart is so heavy

8:14 PM - May 19, 2018

This something I never considered when I was in school. We had fire drills and tornado drills, but never had an active shooter drill.

[MFM008]

1. The most I worried

About was getting beaten up or caught cutting classes....

[Achilleaze]

2. Tragic that republicans will do nothing for America's children

nothing. not a freaking thing.

[MyOwnPeace]

3. America's children don't

line pockets and contribute like the NRA!

[TimeSnowDemos]

7. True but

It's not the NRA's fault.

You can't bribe non-corrupt people.

[malthaussen]

21. You forgot the "sarcasm" tag. n/t

[brush]

27. Beg your pardon? Who's doing the bribing? Of course they're...

at fault.

[Hoyt]

31. As are those that take the bribes and oppose needed gun laws. They are more at fault

in my opinion. They are supposed to do what is best for the people, not gun lobby organization.

[brush]

36. Agreed. Both are at fault.

[pazzyanne]

20. Oh, they fight to get those babies born

but then the babies are on their own. Cut children's health care, cut education, cut SNAP, cut Section 8 and HUD housing, cut, cut, cut, etc. "Sorry, people, you had those kids they are your responsibility. We can't spend tax payer money on your kids. We need to spend that money on the military complex to keep our wars for oil going." I am just sick of them and their values. Their values sure don't match mine.

[Norbert]

4. Our worst was the USSR threat in the 1960s

During the Cuban Missile Crisis I was quite young and didn't understand the gravity of the situation but I knew the adults around me were a little worried. That affected me for a couple months.

Everyone could share in that concern during that time. With an active shooter situation you can only prepare so much and the rest they are left on their own. Not good.

[TimeSnowDemos]

5. Part of being American

And it has been for almost a century now.

School massacres, a solveable problem that won't be fixed during our lifetime.

[Tarc]

6. This is the new normal unless we get registered voters to the ballot box in the fall

Get Out the Vote like lives depend on it...because they kinda do.

[MustLoveBeagles]

28. Yes

It really does.

[watoos]

8. I remember the drills

in the 50's of crawling under our desks to save us from a nuke. Maybe with Trump in office we will have to bring back those nuke drills too.

Trump would be under impeachment right now if he didn't have millions of people supporting him. Our country has lost its soul. Maybe those millions of people have always been around, hiding in the shadows, waiting for someone like Trump to encourage them to come out?

[Timmygoat]

10. I remember tothis day

And I have to admit to my age - I remember as a tiny child in the UK during WW2 when the air raid sirens went off, my parents
would wrap me in a blanket, and head for the dug out that we had in the back of our house, many people hid under heavy tables, to protect themselves from falling debris, it is something that stays with you always. But one thing was different, we usually had
warning and we had someone protecting us. I fear for the children today having to go to school with this coming more and more, they do not deserve it. We had Hitler to unify us against him and the country was trying to protect us from the enemy.
Why is it that we have a government that cannot fight the NRA and will do anything to stop the laws that could help our young people.
In short - why is the NRA stronger than Hitler was?

[catrose]

17. Why indeed?

[Guilded Lilly]

9. My children and daughter in law are all public school teachers...

The worry is constant. The fear is real.

In addition, pushing away paranoia about public places and the openness of my workplace is a constant, not-so-subtle-anymore part of daily life in America.

Damn the guns, damn this hate enabled society.

[Hortensis]

11. How can adults who can't keep things in perspective

themselves give perspective to their children?

We all know many people have believed violent crime rates have been soaring, always soaring, for more than 30 years, where in reality they've actually steadily declined, ultimately very dramatically.

I once drove a neighbor from the suburbs into Hollywood in the middle of a sunny day, and the sight of sidewalks and crosswalks filled with people caused her to lock her door. Everyone knows people drop like flies in urban areas.

Ignorance causes unnecessary, foolish, and even life-blighting fears.

We have 100,000 public schools and 30,000 private, which serve over 50 million students. I have no idea how many classrooms, but that matters because when, in those extremely rare cases when shootings occur somewhere on school grounds, by far most students in most classrooms don't know it.

Yes, we are having a surge in school shootings, but in real-life terms, as far as individual safety is concerned that's a surge from almost nonexistent to only somewhat less than almost nonexistent.

Students are far more likely to die while being driven to school, but don't tell them that, just do our duty as adults and give them the perspective they need to understand they are safe.

[relogic]

13. Perspective

The point of bloody perspective is that some risks can be addressed and ameliorated for the sake of safety while attending school. Violent gun acts perpetrated upon students by the disaffected and rouge individuals is an associated risk far different and requires extreme approaches. We dare not see the normal dangers inherent in schooling as if their rarity statistics should be balanced against the dynamic proportion of weopons killing children 10-30 in a single blast of fury.

[Hortensis]

15. How can the extreme approaches you advocate

"approach" effectiveness if a problem never materializes?

I'm afraid you are completely missing the very perspective I was trying to convey.

We need to consider also that this rise in school shootings will not just continue on. Gun control laws and more careful monitoring for signs of dangerous individuals will combine with shifts in the zeitgeist to put most of it in the past. Older people may remember when airliners were being hijacked by terrorists, seemed like practically every month another was in the news. And then they weren't.

Looking at just one type of "extreme approach," all or almost all of the elaborate setups some schools might adopt for arming teachers, for instance, (quick-release storage only they can activate, special weaponry with special triggers, etc.) would grow old and obsolete without EVER being used.

Expensive ongoing maintenance and continued teacher training, including for new hires, and all the bureaucratic processes involved, would combine to continually drain funding away from critical ongoing needs, frustrating and disgusting everyone involved. This would lead to neglect and hasten the decline of this particular type of "extreme approach" until funds were finally allocated to remove the system altogether.

Perspective is what keeps people here in Georgia from buying face masks for protection from volcanic ash.

[relogic]

18. Mind reading

Does not appear to be a skill either of us possess. Putting quotes around my choice of words does not accurately define them in this case by assigning examples.

I simply wanted to convey caution when discussing these sadly, predictable atrocities that they are by their nature on a scale of death compounded by too easily, accessible weopons. From my perspective many of these weopons keep getting into the hands of these kids from careless parents in their homes. In some cases as recently in the Cruze massacre they were returned kindly to him. After all we know all good 2nd A ideology demands respect for the rights for mentally unstable adolescents to bolster their masculinity by owning such lethal, rapid repeat rifles.

[Hortensis]

23. Making weapons far less accessible nationally. Yes!

We're not just on the same page now but the same sentence.

On a national scale, rather than individual students and schools, deaths from private guns use have become very predictable, and putting sensible controls on access to privately owned guns would be a HUGE, obvious, responsible step with a predictable payoff far larger than saving lives only in schools. Only one of the steps we need to take, but a really big, crucial one.

The NRA said there was no gun control law that could keep the Santa Fe teen from taking his father's legally owned guns. (!) They have to be afraid of this one. This one step has the potential to change our national culture of permissiveness toward negligent gun owners in much the way making drunk driving a felony in itself ended the indulgent chuckles.

[teach1st]

12. We're afraid that bad people will come into school to hurt us

My second graders and I were completing a mandatory bullying survey whole-class this past Friday. One of the questions was: Are you ever afraid at school? Most raised their hands. I asked students to elaborate, and the first student who shared said, "we're afraid that bad people will come into school to hurt us." Most of the class agreed that they shared that feeling.

Second graders. Seven and eight years old. What are we doing to our children?

[KY_EnviroGuy]

14. Another concern is.....

the long-term psychological effects on kids due to increased fears in their innocent years. These negative conditions may also affect their ability to learn in school as they should.

It also raises the question of whether our youth will become increasingly complacent about the prevalence of guns in our society.

In 2015, Texas Gov. Abbott expressed regrets in a Tweet that Texas was #2 in new gun purchases, and that citizens there should crank up the buying. What the hell sort of attitude does that create in our young people?

..... ........

[catrose]

16. I had fire & tornado & Russians-are-attacking drills

but never (and this is important) were there any real fires, tornados, or Russians in my schools.

[Oppaloopa]

35. I had the Cuban missile crisis drills.

[heaven05]

19. "Heavy heart" I bet, I was

hit with a velvet-covered hammer.

The finality is sad.

So much human potential wasted

[Texin]

22. We had drills for fires, tornadoes - and the old "Duck & Cover" routine

in which we were led outside (or under our desks) in the event of an Emergency Alert for a nuclear strike on the U.S. For anyone old enough to remember those good old days, back in the early '60s or so, as a child under the age of twelve, I would wake during the night in sheer terror if I heard so much as an ambulance or firetruck wailing in the distance. I used to worry about what I'd do if I was at school when the Russians launched their missiles at us and I was separated from my parents and my dog, Tippi.

Today we're living in a country where the POTUS* was (s)elected by those same Russians and their allies, the
NR-Fucking-A, a country where the kids talk about what they'll do when some nutter with an assault rifle descends on them and opens fire. God help us.

[calimary]

24. The most tragic part: "...when do you think it will happen"

and not “...if you think it will happen.”

What have we become?

[BigmanPigman]

25. I was a teacher and stopped after Sandy Hook.

I began teaching right before Columbine. You could say that my adult life in elementary school has been a series of various emergency drills of one kind or another. I have to hand it to the kids...they can run VERY FAST and during emergencies they listen really well to instructions from adults.

[Crutchez_CuiBono]

26. Teachers rock

especially the ones in our formulary years. Who can forget their kindergarten etc teacher?

[Hekate]

29. We worried about the USSR bombing us to oblivion & talked about it with our friends, but it was not

...so personal. You could definitely personally die horribly, but not by seeing someone stare right at you and shoot you.

My daughter is afraid to send her children to school, which breaks my heart.

And we have gun worshippers -- in the country and at DU -- essentially saying nothing can be done about this. I was just in a thread with someone whose self-appointed job is to demand we tell him (or her) what laws Americans will actually follow, and then shoot them down (so to speak, huh) one by one without offering plans of his (or her) own.

[pecosbob]

30. At this point I have to make the call that it's better to keep your kids home from school

[House of Roberts]

32. I attended fairly new schools in my town.

I always thought it strange to be worried about a fire. The whole school was concrete, tile and steel. What was going to catch fire besides a few cork bulletin boards?

[Grammy23]

33. Some things that happen during childhood remain with us forever.

There may be scars within that linger on long after the event happened. I lived in Jackson, MS during the Civil Rights Movement. I remember the horror of murdered civil rights workers and others working to change an unfair system that denied basic rights to so many American citizens. It was a scary time where you had to be careful who you spoke to honestly about the events of the day. As a white person (even a child), It was not safe to admit you were for civil rights. My parents unfortunately had to instill in us that we had to be very careful who knew where we stood on that subject.

I also remember the Cuban Missile Crisis. I really understood little about the details, but what I do remember is my parents watching TV and the fear that showed on their faces. Daddy made us be be quiet as we huddled by the TV trying to figure out if we were going to be in a nuclear war.

A few years later, we lived in a Ft. Worth, Texas and were kind of in the thick of things when Kennedy was shot. Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother lived in our neighborhood and I came home from school to find FBI and policemen all around a house not too far from ours. It was chaotic and scary but luckily resolved soon enough with his arrest in Dallas. Then we dealt with the trauma of the assassination and the funeral. Unforgettable.

There were other things that left marks on my psyche such as drills driving out to the edge of town to practice running for our lives in case of a nuclear attack. Friends of my parents actually bought and stocked a bomb shelter in the backyard. It was a crazy time.

So the children of today will remember this time. Some will be traumatized forever. Some will remember but ultimately be okay. Others will be motivated to get involved to find a solution especially since the adults responsible for making the kids safer are doing nothing except offering prayers and platitudes. The members of Congress who are ignoring this do that at their own peril. These kids are not playing. They are living the horror every day. As soon as they are eligible, they will vote. In the meantime, they are organizing and planning. Ignore them all you want, Congressmen. But they are coming after you and will replace you. They are frightened, angry but not afraid to take you on. You are warned.

[davsand]

34. I am in the process of quitting a job at a local university.

When I initially accepted the job my college age daughter asked me if I realized it is a school and shooters are a possibility in that environment. I said I knew it's a possibility--just like it's possible in a movie theater, or a mall, or any other public venue. "Yeah. But this is a SCHOOL. Welcome to my world."

My kid, and her entire generation, never attended a single day of school without the awareness of violence as a possibility. Not a single one. She was born in May of 1997 and Columbine happened in April of 1999. She went to Texas A&M her Freshman year then came back to Illinois for the rest of her college--the same year that Texas passed a law saying students must be allowed to carry guns in all Texas colleges. Her decision to come back to Illinois was driven a great deal by a choice to go to law school rather than med school, but she did talk about that gun law change there and how terrifying she finds it. Me too.

One reason I decided to leave my university position--it's only a component in this decision--was my experience of being in my office when every alarm in the building started blaring and all the emergency lights were flashing. Emergency announcements started going off that we were under a fire alarm and were required to leave the building. This all happened within a couple of days after a shooting resulting in a bunch of dead kids, and there had been much discussion of the shooter triggering fire alarms to get everybody out in the open before he started shooting.

I sat there in my office while the alarms screamed, having the debate with myself about locking myself in the office or taking fast steps out the door. I did leave, but I didn't go back that day. I just couldn't do it. As it turned out, the fire alarms were legit, but I was never in any danger. I had absolutely no way to know that at the time, however. It could just as easily have been something much uglier. I have not felt safe there since.

Our kids LIVE with that feeling every freaking day.

We have completely failed them.


Laura