For Wilshire Baptist Church
In grade school in North Texas in the late 1960s we had three emergency drills: fire, tornado and bomb. That’s all we kids had to worry about aside from bad grades or being sent to the office for acting up.
We had fire drills because buildings have burned down ever since humans learned how to make fire. We had tornado drills because we’re at the southern end of “tornado alley” and tornadoes can spin up whenever the temperature shifts quickly from cold to hot or vice versa. The bomb drills were a remnant of the cold war fear that the Soviet Union might try to start World War III. That drill eventually went away, and tornado drills also faded as meteorological science improved the ability to forecast storms hours in advance. In fact, today schools sometimes will send kids home early or delay the start of school if bad weather is in the forecast.
“Active shooter” was not on the list of potential schoolhouse threats. Come to think of it, it wasn’t a worry at churches, malls, office buildings or factories, either. It just wasn’t, and I can’t imagine what it’s like for students, teachers and parents to have that on the list now. An active shooter is as random and unpredictable as it gets – and potentially more deadly than fire and tornadoes.
When I was in school, everybody in the building was assumed to be a friend of the educational system and rightly so. If you saw a stranger in the hallway, you knew it was a parent or a substitute teacher or someone delivering books or other tools for learning. But now? A shooter can look like a fellow student or a parent, a teacher or a custodian. What’s worse, a shooter can be one of those actual people. I can’t imagine going to school and being wary of my classmates or any grownup in the building.
The shooting this week in Uvalde was unspeakably tragic in loss of life and unexpected in terms of time, date and place. But it wasn’t unpredictable. These tragedies keep happening, and when they do, the unspoken questions are: “When will this end?” and “Where will it happen next?”
We don’t have answers to either of those questions because we haven’t committed to doing what is needed to prevent these tragedies. We can’t stop tornadoes at all, but we’ve learned how to forecast them and take students out of harm’s way. Fires still happen, but we’ve lessened the likelihood with building codes and suppressants, and we still have fire drills to get people out safely. Cold war-style bomb threats are a thing of the past, although they’ve been replaced by the very real threat of terrorism. After 9/11, we implemented new practices and created new government agencies to focus on that, and the record for prevention has been pretty good.
But stopping active shooters? That’s so much more difficult because the issue is all tangled up in personal freedoms that many hold dear: privacy, speech and expression, self-protection, gun ownership, capitalism, dignity, and the list goes on. But there is one freedom that doesn’t get much mention, and it’s one we should all hold dear and protect without hesitation and with everything we have: the freedom of children to grow up without fear.
Perhaps we grownups don’t talk about that much because we’ve all grown up; we’ve forgotten what childhood fear looks and feels like. Or if we’re of a certain age, we didn’t have that fear when we were children, and certainly not at school. We expected to grow up and have a life, and we did. But now?
This is not a drill. This is real; this is happening now. This horror must end. It must end now.