Shooter incident at elementary school in Uvalde, Texas - 19 children and 2 adults dead

sad read
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.............I know, of course, that her elementary school has done such drills. In 2023, all schools do them, as we did fire drills growing up at my suburban central-Jersey high school.

Those fire drills, though, were more often than not a cause for celebration and levity. Whatever we were doing in class we could stop doing, pour joyfully into the halls, out onto the vast expanse of lawns that served as athletic fields behind the gym, scanning for our friends, hands over our eyes to block the sun. Now and then, we sniffed the air for smoke, listened for the rustle of rumor: Could it be real this time? Our teachers might try to enforce solemnity, marching us out the door, but if we had even the faintest sense it was a drill, all bets were off.

What I didn’t know—and maybe what I didn’t want to know, what I never in my wildest dreams wanted to know—was what my children experienced during their drills.

Active shooter. When I grew up, this was the guard on the basketball team, cutting through the lane, sneaking baseline for a backdoor pass.

“The great Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa said that to be an artist means never to avert your eyes,” writes novelist Robert Olen Butler, a line I always quote to my own writing students. “And that’s the hardest thing, because we want to flinch …”

I close the hardcover book, holding my finger to mark the page.

“What happened?” I ask her.

“We locked the door and turned out the lights,” my daughter begins. “Since our class is big”—27 students, each of them filled with wonder and words, containing multitudes—“we had to make a snake against the wall and snake around the corner.”

I narrow my eyes. Around the corner … to a place where they might be visible from the other side of the door? “Does your classroom door have a window?” I ask.

She nods. “You can kind of see in, but the lights are out, and we are all squatting down, not standing up.”

In my mind’s eye, I placed my own daughter in the shadows, safely shy of the bend, out of eyeshot.

“But the lights are out, right?” I need to confirm.

She may have rolled her eyes. “If it was a real person coming into the school and the lights weren’t out, we would be making it clear that we were learning,” she says, matter-of-factly. “That would be so bad. We would be in serious danger.”

I shift my jaw. I ask her if the teachers put other things in front of the door. Tables. Chairs. Books. I wanted them to. I want them to push desks, slide cabinets, throw every single thing they have in their classroom in front of that two-inch-wide wooden door with the slim vertical window. The fish bowl. The pencil cases. My daughter’s pink zip-around lunch box with the sliced apples and peanut butter, and even the gi she will don for karate practice after school.

Throw it, I want to say. Throw it—now!

On the bed, I hold myself still. “The murderer wouldn’t be able to get in,” she reassures me, “because he doesn’t have a key.”

I nod. This word—murderer—dropping from her sweet lips in the middle of a bedtime story in spring … it ricocheted around my brain like something that could split atoms............

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/worl...p&cvid=adba7fca512c44e39f5202b3da629f3d&ei=12