Damn it I'm tired of "Be afraid, be very afraid."
This relates to the Ahmed Mohamed story where the police chief is claiming that it was a hoax bomb that they were concerned about. Bullshit. Too many in law enforcement are inciting people to FREAK OUT when someone (especially a person with a "suspicious" name) brings something like a home-made clock into a school, and they are using the tiny percentage of school shootings as leverage to get us to be overly alarmed. It's become sport for them. I teach second grade in a small town in Texas and just had to endure yet another intruder drill training led by a local cop / school liaison officer, and let me state that I'm o.k. with having a plan, just in case. But this guy wanted to whip us into a fear frenzy. First, he had to tell the staff about a recent exercise where he made fake bombs of every type out of propane tanks and what not and loaded them along with every weapon he had as well as 600 rounds of ammo into his car and drove to the undisclosed (to the local officers) site where a drill was to take place, the upshot being that he was able to drive around our small town with all of this loading down his trunk and back seat, waving at fellow officers and the citizenry that he knew on his way to the site without suspicion. The punchline was that he stationed himself on the roof of the building being used in the drill and that the responding officers "never looked up" and he was able to "pick off" 3 officers. Not sure how this all related to our intruder drill training except as a show of bravado, to get us in a certain emotional state. He then asks us where the top three places people are being killed by guns now: Schools, churches and movie theaters. Wrong, I'm thinking. It's the home during domestic disputes. He asks us how many kids are being killed in schools now and, predictably, the teacher response was "lots," the teacher next to me letting out a big sigh. "Right, lots," he responds, which is just statistically false. The chances of someone shooting up any of the 3 schools in our little Texas town, let alone in any Texas town, are minuscule, but he had everyone convinced that it could happen. He even recommended that we keep our classroom doors locked at all times which some teachers are already doing, a real pain in the ass when I need to retrieve something from a printer in their rooms. I refuse to lock my door as we already have every exterior door save for the front one locked at all times, a precaution I find reasonable not for fear of an active shooter but for the sake of barring entry by anyone on the street who wants to just walk in for whatever reason. Lots of child custody issues of late and such.
To top it off, a Barney Fife sheriff's deputy who was present at this training took it upon himself to return later in the week to my second grade hallway during class yelling, "TEACHERS! INTRUDER ALERT!!!" I did what I was trained to do in our intruder drill plan, but was confused because I knew his voice and thought it was a pretty sorry attempt at a drill. He could've at least fired off a fake round or two, and I'll bet he was itching to do just that. He apparently got reprimanded for doing this, at least. As I said, this guy is generally regarded as a Barney Fife.
So....
Be afraid, be very afraid.
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