Full disclosure: Mary Butz is my spouse. She had a distinguished career as a teacher, an assistant principal, a high school principal, and a trainer of principals in her 34-year career in the New York City public schools.
In this post, she describes the challenges of protecting students on a daily basis.
She notes that when Trump visited the Florida hospital where students were in recovery, he praised them and the hospital staff. She did not hear similar praise for the heroic teachers who shielded their students and even died to protect them.
Teachers signed up to teach, not to act as human shields or cops. They too need protection, not to be armed and enlisted to work in a firing zone.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I woke up this morning remembering what it was like when I was teaching. There were students everywhere. Many arrived early in the morning and some were still around late at night. My classroom was surrounded by other classrooms full of students during the regular school day when a shooter might show up.
If I had been armed with an automatic pistol and fired in any direction, I would have hit other classrooms with an average of 34 students in each one and a teacher and sometimes other adults helping the teacher or observing. No matter which way I fired a pistol, there would be another classroom and if the classroom wasn’t there, there were the streets with traffic and businesses and houses on the other side of those streets. People everywhere.
Between classes, the halls were filled (packed is a better description) with students moving from one class to the next. Even trained as I was from the time I was a U.S. Marine, there would be no way to avoid hitting another student in that crowd even if I could identify the shooter. If there was a shooter, that crowd would be in a panic running everywhere. One shot from a pistol I carried, even if it hit the shooter could end up passing through the shooter and hitting a student behind them.
If all the teachers are armed and several are shooting at the shooter if they can see the shooter and there are others all around in a panic, the death toll and wounded could end up much higher.
How could any teacher live with that for the rest of their lives — that they fired on a shooter but missed and hit another child and/or that they hit the shooter but also took out one or more children behind the shooter?
What happens to the teachers then — will they be lauded as heroes or crucified as careless killers?
No matter how much one trains to become a skilled shooter, there is no one, I repeat, no one, not even the best snipers in the military that don’t miss their target and hit something else to either side or behind it without hitting the target.
Once you pull that trigger, that round is going to go somewhere with no guarantee that you will hit what you wanted to hit. Even if you shoot straight up into the sky, that bullet will eventually come back down and hit the earth or something/someone else.
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Lloyd,
You are being waaaaay too logical.
Turn off your brain completely and you might (might) have some small chance of understanding where the politicians are coming from.
From what I have read, LSD might help in that regard, though I can’t say for sure because I have never tried it.
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LSD!!!
Seriously. HA! HA! HA!
I’m drug-free and that includes alcohol — disclaimer: since 1982. Before 1982 for a decade and a half, I was saturated with alcohol most of the time. And I can tell you it didn’t help. It made it worse.
But I do want to be Trump free, Pence free, GOP free, Koch free, Walton free, Bill Gates free, et al. They are all malignant parasites attempting to invade my head and eat me alive.
Every morning I spend twenty minutes meditating and focusing on keeping those toxic parasites out of my head.
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Mary’s post is so spot on- no praise for the teachers who do this every single day. So sad…….
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Quote: The Gun Lobby’s interpretation of the Second Amendment is one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American People by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime. The real purpose of the Second Amendment was to ensure that state armies – the militia – would be maintained for the defense of the state. The very language of the Second Amendment refutes any argument that it was intended to guarantee every citizen an unfettered right to any kind of weapon he or she desires. – Warren Burger, Conservative Supreme Court Chief Justice
The Second Amendment “has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud,’ on the American public,” former chief justice Warren E. Burger said in a 1991 interview on PBS’s “MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour.” Burger has said often that the “right to bear arms” belongs to the states, and he has attacked the NRA for fostering the opposite view.
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Link to above: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/supcourt/stories/courtguns051095.htm
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imagine a national survey of all gun advocates asking them to simply repeat the actual complete wording of the 2nd amendment…
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I hope this post goes viral , along with other post from teachers and administrators who know the difference between realities and the fantasies being spun from the White House and NRA.
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This is WHAT I have been saying FOREVER. Some look at me quizzically then I tell them and finally “some” get it. Depends on how smart they are and whether or not they just “mouth blaming teachers for the ills of society.”
Remember: Dump is NO responder; he hides (eats junk food, tweets nonsense, and claims fame), then after being glutinous, he is ready to spout crazy stuff.
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If an armed teacher killed an innocent attempting to stop a madman with a gun, not only would this be impossible to bear, the teacher would probably charged with involuntary manslaughter. Politicians would probably lead the charge to ruin the teacher’s career and life.
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“Teachers should be everything”
Teacher should be social worker
Teacher should be proctor
Teacher should disarm berserker
Teacher should be doctor
Teacher should be everything
That others should have done
Teacher shan’t be paid a thing
Cuz teachers work for fun
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Teacher should do everything
That others should have done
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berserker. an ancient Norse warrior who fought in a wild frenzy.
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Really nice piece.
The beginning reminded me of a time I stumbled upon a few young adults where they shouldn’t have been on the property. A vacant doublewide house down the road. I sensed something wasn’t right as soon as I walked up and immediately -like Mary-went into my “teacher mode”, diffusing what I now think could have become a bad confrontation.
The kids beat it. Some time after I discovered a ripped window screen in back. Crap…I remembered one guy did come from behind the house and had probably been in the process of breaking in when I surprised them. I could have been clonked on the head out here in the middle of nowhere. I don’t know who they were or where they disappeared to. Likewise, I’ll never quite know at what moment in my teaching career I gained this sort of second sense, the ability to quickly read complicated social situations and react as a peacemaker, so to speak.
All things considered, though, like Mary concludes, whatever teacher skills I have gained would probably fall far, far short if I ever was confronted with an “active shooter.” God forbid.
I do have 8 old-school-style filing cabinets over by my classroom door packed with 30 years of teaching material…old lessons, students’ work, projects never quite finished. People joke with me about my collection of file cabinets. I had a student years ago….a BIG guy who I really liked -though he did have a knack for getting himself into a certain degree of trouble in school.
“Don’t worry, Mr. O,” he said one day when we had a surprise lockdown drill. “I’ll pick up those file cabinets if you want and barricade the door.”
I have no doubt Alex could have tossed those file cabinets, making a quick wall. Good luck to any attacker trying to get though that mountain of teacher STUFF. Crazy thing is, it’s still part of the plan that rattles around in the back of my head. “Barricade the door with file cabinets”. Talk about the weird lesson plans teachers live with nowadays.
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The cold, hard fact that teachers are the first responders for kids education cannot be over emphasized. It’s a shame that they can’t just be thought of and respected as teachers and that the fact of their first responder status has to be brought forward, but that is where we are these days.
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Diane,
Yvonne Sui- Runyan made the following comment: “Remember: Dump is NO responder; he hides (eats junk food, tweets nonsense, and claims fame), then after being glutinous, he is ready to spout crazy stuff.”
Yvonne I would like to correct your misinformation —
Believe it or not, US President Donald Trump once stopped an armed attack on the streets of New York City.
The incident was chronicled by The New York Daily News on November 20, 1991.
In an article titled, “Mugger’s Trumped: Donald stops attack” [sic], the current president is instrumental in stopping a mugging he sees occurring while riding in his stretch limo with former wife Marla Maples en route to a Paula Abdul concert.
Witnesses say the businessman saw the mugging taking place, then confronted the bat-wielding attacker who was so surprised to see Trump he fled.
Trump played down his heroic efforts, telling the Daily News, “I’m not looking to play this thing up… I’m surprised you found out about it.”
The report is seeing renewed interest in the wake of the president’s comments claiming he would have ran into the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School two weeks ago to confront an armed gunman:
“You know I really believe – you don’t know until you’re tested – but I think I, I really believe I’d run in there even if I didn’t have a weapon. And I think most of the people in this room would have done that too. But the way they performed was really a disgrace.”
Read the November 20, 1991 New York Daily News article:
MAKE IY A GREAT DAY!
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Jscheidell,
Are you talking about the same man who can’t stand the sight of blood? The same guy who dodged the Vietnam draft five times, the last with a “bone spur” in his foot? The same man who walked away from a man who fell over at Mar-a-Lago because Trump was afraid he might get bloody? That hero?
Read this: https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-time-donald-trump-turned-away-in-disgust-while-a-man-bled-to-death-in-front-of-him
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Let’s see. Trump was in his Limo. He had a chauffeur driving him and from what I’ve learned about his life, he didn’t go anywhere without a bodyguard or more than one. So, Trump gets out of his limo and allegedly confronts a bat welding mugger but behind Trump is his chauffeur and one or more armed bodyguards.
Trump’s longtime bodyguard is or was Keith Schiller. Before Schiller, Trump had other bodyguards.
Snopes also says the allegation that Trump stopped a mugging in 1991 is unproven.
“Witnesses said Trump, with Marla Maples tugging at his arm to try to stop him, leaped from his black stretch limousine during the Manhattan assault.
“Someone in the car looked over and said, ‘Gee, look at that, it’s a mugging,’ ” Trump said. “I said to my driver to stop the car because it was brutal-looking.” …
“However, the public record of the incident all stems from a single report, and even that account was contradictory about exactly what took place. One named witness asserted that the would-be mugger had already run off by the time Trump exited his limo, and the billionaire did nothing more than join a crowd of onlookers after the fact. Another anonymous witness supported Trump’s account, maintaining that the bat-wielder had apparently dropped his weapon in response to the billionaire’s verbally confronting him. Local police said they could provide no information about what transpired, as the incident wasn’t reported to them”
Trump spews lies like someone with the flu spews lethal viruses, mucus, and vomit.
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Knowing his habits of boasting and lying, I doubt he showed any bravery. The account probably came from him with no witnesses.
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From what I read this morning, It seems the only witness Trump had to support his latest boat was listed as anonymous, but other witnesses that were there and that were identified say he just stopped to join the crowd and watch.
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