In the Texas farming town of Harrold, no bigger than a bullet hole on a map, there’s a new addition to fashionable back-to-school apparel. All the coolest teachers will now be sporting loaded pistols in the classroom.
Around Baltimore, we can just imagine some of the classroom conversation:
“Spit out that chewing gum, Timmy, or I open fire.”
A joke, of course.
Harrold is a long way from Baltimore. In that small Texas town of only 110 students, the local school board gave the go-ahead to become the first community in America to allow teachers to carry concealed firearms. And they have specific reasons.
Columbine is said to be one, Virginia Tech another.
At the Columbine high school massacre, 15 kids lost their lives; at Virginia Tech, 33 died.
During the past decade, more than a dozen schools have been hit by mass shootings, and those in Harrold say they’re particularly vulnerable to such a tragedy because the town is 25 miles from the nearest sheriff’s office and located just off a major highway, Interstate 287, making for an easy getaway.
Never mind that Harrold’s school has card-swipe entry for rooms and screening for visitors – guns for teachers are now the prescribed antidote to violence.
Around here, we will now wait for that next, inevitable voice asking: Why can’t we have pistol-packing professors in Baltimore?
If Harrold’s worried about violence, how should educators in America’s urban areas feel? We don’t have to import our violence, we tend to cultivate it from within, and with more regularity than we’d like to think about.
We haven’t forgotten the art teacher Jolita Berry, have we?
Last April, Berry, 30, was pummeled by a female student at Reginald F. Lewis High School while other scholars in the classroom stood by and cheered. (see baltimoreexaminer.com to read the series on teacher violence) Not all the others. One was too busy filming the attack on her cell phone to join in the grand time. The film was later shown on local TV stations and the Internet and, for the full humiliation, on NBC’s Today Show.
Remember? There was poor Berry on the floor, trying to curl into the fetal position to protect herself, screaming for help, while this tenth grade girl pounds her mercilessly.
And how does this equation change if the teacher’s got a gun?
Does someone like Berry pull out the pistol and try to hold everyone at bay until the cops can show up? Or, in a moment of panic, does she simply open fire? Or, if she hasn’t got time to pull out the gun, do her students snatch the gun and open fire on her – and call it self-defense?
Because, let’s remember one other thing: After the beating, at least one brain-dead administrator blamed Berry for getting beat up, saying she uttered a buzz word or two that might have set off the attacker.
So now we’ll have a new model for inflated classroom violence: teacher says a buzz word, kids start to attack, teacher defends herself – the key word will be “defense,” of course – by reaching for a gun.
We can talk all we want about the dozen or so shooting tragedies around the country over the past decade – but routine violence, and the nerve-wracking threat of it – are far more prevalent in urban classrooms than they are in a small town like Harrold.
Which is why, as absurd and frightening as the Harrold decision sounds to countless educators, parents and others with brain cells, the notion is even more frightening for crowded places such as the Baltimore metro area.
When word of the Harrold decision made national news, I spoke with three former Baltimore- area teachers, who have a combined half-century’s experience. They were all appalled at the idea.
“Think of all the possibilities for accidents,” said one.
“If I had to teach under those conditions,” said another, “I wouldn’t.”
“And what happens if a kid gets hold of the teacher’s gun?” said a third.
We’ve got all sorts of problems in America’s schools: not just the threat of outside violence, but kids who never learn the basics for surviving in the workplace, who can’t read, can’t do simple math, who come to school each day full of anger fueled by their lives at home and in their neighborhoods and make so much commotion that they keep classmates from focusing.
And, beginning with little Harrold, no bigger than a bullet hole on a map but spreading who knows where, we think we can feel better, and safer, with something as puny as a gun.
