Familiarity + Context + Devil's Advocate = Meaningful Discussion

The title is from the first reading of the semester, and we're having more than enough opportunity to apply that formula.

Yesterday in class we talked about the campus shooting at Purdue University, which is just two hours away. One student sent me an email with a link to the story, with this comment:

I feel like a week ago I was so oblivious to the world around me. The more we talk about guns and violence, the more I seem to realize this isn't a safe world. It's nuts that something so devastating can happen so quickly!

Of course I was glad the student was engaged with the subject and becoming more aware, but I also felt a twinge of dismay that young people in general are so oblivious to the political, social, and physical dangers that surround us.

After yesterday's discussion, I realized I had no idea what I was talking about.

Most, if not all, of them have grown up with lockdown drills. IN MIDDLE SCHOOL. (Of course now even elementary schools are holding "active shooter" drills.) One after another, they shared stories of their teachers turning off the classroom lights and locking the door, everyone huddling together in a corner and staying quiet. Some of them have been taught to throw things at an attacker, which I thought was a joke when I first heard about it. Of course the kids don't take it seriously; they giggle and talk and joke, because they're kids. Who are not supposed to have to deal with this. They've grown up post-Columbine and, to them, this is simply the way the world is.  That's not willful obliviousness; it's normal to them. Which is far, far worse.

Apparently kids aren't the only ones not taking the threat of school violence seriously:





"I'll have the T.A. tackle him if he comes in," jokes professor Rebecca Trax, who I sincerely hope is fired for her idiocy. (You can read the rest of the article here.)

What would we do in such a situation? The consensus among the class was to escape out the window - fortunately we're on the first floor, though our windows are the old-fashioned kind that crank open only about 12 inches. We decided that we'd have to smash them with a chair or table, and get out that way. And, like Liviu Librescu, I realized I would have to be the last one out of the room.

I never imagined this kind of class discussion when I went to grad school to pursue a life of the mind.

They wanted to talk, though, which of course we did. (There's always time to write later.) Everyone was limited to two speaking turns, holding up cards numbered "1" and "2" that I collected each time they spoke. We have some quiet folks, and some that are very...um, eager. About a third of the class knew someone at Purdue, including me (our regional director of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America is a professor of neuroscience, and her Facebook status about "sheltering in place" was what first alerted me to the shooting). One received a text photo from a friend, showing students huddling in the basement of their class building, which I'll include here when I get a copy. Another questioned whether the incident should be defined as a campus shooting, since the shooter targeted a specific individual, apparently not intending to harm anyone else, and immediately surrendered to police after the killing. "It could have happened anywhere," which of course is true. A few drew comparisons between our previous exercise of writing a campus policy to address/prevent  campus violence, and wondered whether any kind of policy could help them if the worst actually happened. (Purdue's safety procedures are available as videos on YouTube rather than written.) Some said that they would not think to watch the videos in a moment of crisis for instructions on what to do; others pointed out that having any kind of instructions ahead of time (rather than during an actual emergency) could be valuable and prevent people from "freezing up." But can you ever really be "prepared" for such a horrific scenario? One student said his high school teacher used to keep a bat and a crowbar behind his desk, in case an attacker threatened the class. Others shared memories of the "red-paper-green-paper" system of alerting first responders whether the students in the classroom were ok or needed help.

It was a good and necessary discussion, and while I was glad to see them really thinking and talking about it (referring back to specific things others and said and being respectful whenever they disagreed), I saw that some of the Devil's Advocate job would fall to me. So I took a deep breath, and asked the question that comes up every single time this happens: "What about a gun? A crowbar or a bat isn't going to do much good against someone armed with a  long-range weapon. Would having a gun in the classroom make us safer?"*

The consensus, to my relief, was no. (One student who has military training was especially adamant that "that's not a good idea at all.") But their reasoning took me totally by surprise: while I thought, "God no, I wouldn't want to have to keep a gun in the classroom, because a disgruntled student might get ahold of it and shoot me or someone else," their thinking was "The teacher might get mad at a student and shoot them."

My first instinct was to laugh. (From shock, not because it was funny - though I didn't.) Because they followed that with stories of teachers in high school, even middle school, who hit students, choked them, threw things or screamed at the... in other words had serious anger issues that could have been a thousand times worse with a ready weapon at hand. A student from Arizona, who reports a very different gun culture there than in Chicago, summed it up by saying, "If I knew professors were armed, I'd be out of that school so fast. I'd choose somewhere else to go to college."

It never occurred to me, prior to Virginia Tech, to ever be afraid of my students. But it never occurred to me until just over 24 hours ago to think that THEY might potentially be afraid of ME, or of anyone charged with mentoring and protecting them. It was a sickening thought. Is this the kind of America we want to live in?

Many of us (myself included) were more comfortable withe the idea of armed, trained security officers in classrooms or hallways - an idea that I didn't embrace until after Newtown. But the people who study violence in school settings have come to the conclusion that very few, if any, of the preventive measure we're now trying are effective. One student asked, "Were there any laws passed after Newtown?" And boy, there's a question that will take awhile to answer:

Of the approximately 1500 state gun bills introduced after the massacre at Sandy Hook elementary school, committed by a mentally ill young man whose mother bought him an arsenal, only 109 have become law: 39 restrict access to guns, and 70 make guns easier to obtain and carry. This is due in large part to the influence of the NRA, a powerful political lobby that helped defeat the Manchin-Toomey bill that would have required federal background checks for all gun purchases.

"Background checks wouldn't have prevented [fill in the blank]," people can (and do) say. And that may be true. But then we're back to doing nothing.



After this post, I'm turning the blog over the students for each of them to write a post on a topic of their choosing. Keep watching this space. 



*I for one am pretty firmly convinced by the evidence that more guns do not make us safer, and in fact contribute significantly to nonjustifiable homicide and injury rates. But the concealed-carry lobby claims that crime is lower in states where everyone (presumably) carries a weapon; I wanted to find hard evidence that this isn't true, but it looks like the answers are inconclusive at best. [FIND LINK]