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Texas Mandates Panic Buttons In All Classrooms In Response To Mass Shootings
(www.huffpost.com)
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A summary of ideas commonly proposed by Republican politicians in response to school shootings:
Harden schools against intruders by locking doors and installing bullet proof glass
Reduce the number of entrances and exits to further harden schools against external attackers
Install metal detectors to prevent students or visitors from bringing guns onto school property undetected
Eliminate backpacks/ require clear backpacks to prevent students from concealed carrying weapons
Arm teachers so they can kill school shooters
Hire more armed peace officers/school police to respond more quickly to school shooters
Require panic buttons to more quickly alert police to the presence of a school shooter
Notice that all of these ideas are reactive, and that none of these proposed solutions extend beyond the bounds of school property. It is assumed that there are people with guns who will try to kill schoolchildren, and they aren’t going to even try to solve that problem. They just take the existence of school shooters for granted, as a though it’s an innate part of society or a naturally occurring phenomenon like earthquakes.
That position would be a lot more defensible if the US wasn’t an outlier among developed nations for gun violence, and in particular school shootings.
I'm a teacher and a gun owner. I will tell off any administrator who tells me that I'll be issued a firearm for my classroom and that part of my job is to eliminate an intruder.
Ironically, the last district I taught at specifically told us to think about ourselves first and get to safety. We were told to run, even if that meant leaving the kids behind.