Sometimes
we feel hopeless in the face of tragedy and violence. Some people retreat into anger or
confusion. Others just shut down.
I refuse
to adhere to just one reaction. All of
us have different emotional make-ups and the issue of gun violence is very
complex. Politics, religion, sex, and
where you reside (a city, suburban, rural area) all influence what position you
take on whether gun ownership protects or endangers those around you.
I can
only speak from my experience. I live in
the most populous city in the U.S. and am lucky that I have never witnessed a
shooting. I have also worked for almost
thirty years in the Bronx and used public transportation every day. In the high school where I worked in the west
Bronx, there were incidents involving student fights and gang violence. I sometimes had to break up fights in my
classroom or assist controlling incidents in the hallways.
After
retirement, I worked for two years at a live-in facility for teenagers who were
locked down because they came from detention centers or the psychiatric wards
of city hospitals. They themselves were
often the victims of parental and street violence. Adults who worked at this facility were
trained to respond to students who were out-of-control and almost every day
there was an alert on the loudspeaker system for such an incident.
Despite
all of these experiences, I never once felt that allowing a security officer or
aide to possess a weapon was a solution to these problems. And I know I would have felt unsafe in an
environment with adults and guns.
On the
other hand, I have participated in many situations in which I felt students
were unsafe and I, and other teachers, reacted quickly to these events to
protect the students. For example, I
remember one morning when the hallways and classrooms were filled with smoke
because of a raging fire in the street outside the school. The school administration issued no
announcements over the intercom to evacuate the students so I took it upon
myself to lead my class outside the building.
Once
again it was apparent that adults like teachers, parents, security personnel
and even teenagers can make their own decisions about how to protect themselves
without the use of weapons to control the situation. Using a weapon only signifies that things are
out of control as evidenced by what happened in Newtown on December 14, 2012
and will continue to happen so long as guns are all around us.
