I Had a Plan

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When I was a teacher, I formulated a plan after a spate of mass shootings in the late 1990 and early 2000s. My classroom was in a quadrangle of portable classrooms and located at one corner of the quad. My plan, if I saw a person with a weapon enter the quad, was to flick off the lights and push out the screen to the window that overlooked a narrow dirt area bordering the road behind our school that lead to the community college.

I planned to have my kids climb out the window and drop to the dirt and huddle there until we were all out. I even knew which kids I would choose to help the smaller ones down from the window—strong, tall kids who could more easily stand at the window to help, ones who were calm and kind.

I planned what I would tell them to enlist their silence and stealth. As they crawled toward the window, going out one by one, I would call the office and alert them to the danger. If I could do it without being noticed by the gunman, I would lock my door.

When we were all out, we would melt into the woods on the other side of the road and follow the road to the college where we could get help and be safe.

Fortunately, I never needed to put my plan into action. I think of the two teachers at Robb Elementary, trying to shield their kids; the kids, unable to escape and shot like sitting ducks; the kids covered in blood not their own and waiting to be shot; the wounded survivors, -- some physically, but all, emotionally. The years of nightmares and terror ahead; the abyss of loss for the families and friends, the heart of a community rent into pieces, the guilt that survivors often feel after enduring a physical journey of healing, the emotional scars—all of which lie still ahead. Years and years of it. Trauma doesn’t go away; it stays in our bodies and hearts forever until it is recognized, brought forth and dealt with. But not everyone knows that and even those who do, don’t always know how it will manifest and what can be done to heal.

Will this cycle of death, blame, protests and inaction continue until every single person in the United States has been directly affected--until every one of us has lost someone to mass shootings or become victims ourselves? Will the NRA and the people who scream in fear that their gun rights are violated by background checks and limitations on ammo and types of weapons ever, ever, ever, get their heads out of their own asses and see that the world has changed? It’s not 1775; it doesn’t take a week or a month to get the news, and weapons don’t fire a single shot and then need to be reloaded.

You need a rifle if you hunt; you may need a handgun if you want to protect your family from criminals but NO ONE needs an assault weapon to do either. Shooting a deer with an assault rifle is overkill; shooting an intruder with one will more likely kill one of your neighbors as the bullets tear through your house and into theirs.

STOP telling me you have Second Amendment Rights and you need your damn guns. No one is taking away your damn guns.  Hunt and protection—that’s what the founding fathers felt we needed weaponry for. They didn’t envision rifles that effortlessly spew hundreds of rounds in seconds. They didn’t envision people acting out their fantasies or their pain by murdering dozens. They didn’t predict the movies that desensitize murder and the video games that let you rehearse shooting many. They didn’t forsee that celebrity would become so needful to some that live streaming murder would become a way to get it.
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 In Texas, you can’t kill a fetus after six weeks, but you can buy assault rifles at age 18 and murder 19 children. If the criterion for obtaining a gun was as strict as the criterion for obtaining an abortion, maybe the results would be different.