There’s a great push in modern western society to take the fight out of men (and women, I suppose). We’re trained to be passive, submissive - to rely on the Real Men, the agents of the government like police, to handle the tough situations. That we should just be meek and quiet and hope that the official Real Men can come in time to save us.
Many people will be outraged at the very idea of teaching people to fight back - perhaps even most. After all, we all know the proper response to a dangerous situation is to become a sheep-like as possible and hope for the mercy of the crazy guy trying to cause harm. I’m surprised something like flight 93 even happened, to be honest, the way people typically respond to situations like that. Although I do remember reading a quote from one of the cell phone conversations - one of the men on the flight told his wife “Me and a few of the men have decided to take them out” or something along those lines. I could imagine most of the men on that flight meekly protesting even as some real men took the situation into their hands.
I wouldn’t be surprised if in a week or two, the district had to retract this policy and offer a public apology for having the gaul to teach people to be proactive in their own safety. But it was a good news story to read, anyway.
I just had a RotJ flashback. Weren’t those Ewoks cute taking out the storm troopers?
“Alright children, who wants to be the first to pile onto the strange man holding the assault rifle? Come on now, he can only shoot so many of you before you take him down!”
What about banks? Should a lobby full of bank customers rush the guy with an assault rifle? The question is moot because it’s not going to happen. It’s not going to happen because nobody wants to get shot.
First, Response Options is a company with a product to sell. It is apparently capitalizing on the current scare surrounding the three school shootings that have occurred within the past month. In the process, it is also making the school district feel good that they’re teaching children skills that may never need to be used. In fact, the Response Options website has a letter from the Burleson ISD as its only testimonial. It describes, in rather glowing terms, the “quality” of the program, and said that students and staff will feel “empowered”.
Second, what if (God forbid) a shooting happens next year, or three or ten years from now? Are these kids going to remember their “training”? Are future generations of students going to be “trained”? How can the district continue to justify the time and cost of a program like this, given that the odds of a school shooting happening there are fairly small.
Finally, I don’t think the problem is that people are passive. I think the problem is that we’re all so afraid of being the victims of violence that a school district is willing to spend time and money, not to mention the possibility of scaring the shit out of its students, to “train” children and staff for an event that may well never happen. I’d rather that money go to a more realistic plan of providing, say, emergency communications equipment in the classrooms to let the teachers get to some competent help.
I suspect in about the next 20 posts, this will escalate to “what will the toddlers do with their crayons as the guy sets up a tripod mounted water-cooled machine gun to mow them down?”
BTW, I certainly don’t advocate knee-jerk responses, of any sort, to specific events like school shooting. I don’t know what the training entails - but unless it’s practical general self defense training, or it’s quick and cheap, then I suppose I would be much more hesistant to advocate it.
I’m totally on board with the OP. As we know, almost every school child eventually ends up in some sort of hostage situation by the time they reach high school age, and every hostage situation I’ve ever heard of always ended up with dead children piled up in heaps.
I know all you milquetoasts and pantywaists are far too limp-wristed to ever allow your ten-year-olds to pack concealed heat, so the least you can do is let your school boards hire altruistic outfits like Response Options to teach kids how to stab adults in the calves with a pencil . Lord knows such skills are the only things that saved me the three or four times I was held hostage by gun-toting maniacs in grade school.
“At Burleson — which has 10 schools and about 8,500 students — the training covers various emergencies, such as tornadoes, fires and situations where first aid is required. Among the lessons: Use a belt as a sling for broken bones, and shoelaces make good tourniquet.”
It sounds like it’s just generally good emergency situation training - that’s probably entirely more useful than most of the stuff kids will learn in a similar time period.
I find one implication in the training deeply troubling: the implication that if the students do fight back by throwing books at the gunman, but that the gunman perseveres, and that a hostage situation occurs and that kids are killed anyway, that somehow the students have failed, and the ones who survive will have to live with the self-imposed guilt that they tried to fight back, and failed, and people died because they failed. It puts too much of the burden–too much of the responsibility for saving their school from a mad gunman–upon the kids. Sometimes shit just happens, and sometimes Evil just targets your life, and there’s not a whole lot you can do about it, self-defense courses notwithstanding.
Also, “feeling empowered” when you really aren’t is just as “namby-pamby” as being passive. And it’s dangerous. Teaching a seven-year-old that he can go toe-to-toe with an armed gunman is going to get that seven-year-old killed.
The difference between a classroom shooting and flight 93 (well, one of them) was that by fighting back the passengers on that flight saved the lives of many other people by stopping the hijackers from accomplishing their objective. A school shooter’s objective, on the other hand, is usually just to kill a lot of people. Training kids to attack a shooter just seems to me as though it’ll get them killed sooner, really. I can’t see kids being able to get a gun (or several guns) off of a determined person without there being casualties, and that’s assuming that the kids are actually able to try something and aren’t under their tables pissing themselves anyway. This sounds like a pointless waste of money. The first aid information, on the other hand, does sound pretty useful; i’d be all for that.
Just as a reply to the OP, i’m all for people standing up for themselves. Kids standing up for themselves against an armed gunman who is actively trying to kill them? I think the good ol’ option of fleeing is the one that’ll save most life in that situation.
Well that part does sound eminently sensible. After all, teaching schoolkids to run directly at armed maniacs pretty much guarantees that first aid is going to be required, doesn’t it?
“Remember, kids, getting under desks and praying for rescue from professionals is not a recipe for success. Rush the tornado and hit it with everything you’ve got-- books, pencils, legs and arms. Only sheep leave a building meekly and wait for the fire department-- real men beat the crap out of a blaze with their own hands. Flames feed on oxygen, so a fire’s most vulnerable spots are the throat and solar plexus.”
Seriously, that’s blackly hilarious. Way to go, Texas; real men don’t worry about feeding derogatory stereotypes. Remember the Alamo!
You know, a Vickers Gun, Browning M1917, or a Maxim M1910 can’t really be operated by one guy- you need someone to load and feed the belt as well. And except for the M1910, they’re not the most portable of MGs, either.
(No, I haven’t been whooshed- I’m just making a comment in slightly poor taste).
Seriously though, teaching 7 year olds to take on armed gunmen is just… dangerous. I’m reminded of that Seinfeld episode where Kramer takes up Karate so he can fight 7 year olds, secure in the knowledge they can’t beat him…
Hmm, maybe it’s not nearly as terrible as some are saying. Didn’t Revenant Threshold advocate this very action?
Still, waste of money IMHO. How much is that school district spending on this? I bet Master Wang-Ka could come up with a half-dozen things his school needs more than a British Army Reserve Major giving speeches.
And for some reason, I keep imagining Sergeant-Major “Shut Up” Williams from It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, in full uniform, parading up and down in front a classroom full of 7 year olds, calling them “'Orrible little men and women” and telling them that “They’re a bunch of poofs” if they don’t try and engage armed intruders in hand-to-hand combat.
The likelihood of a particular school being the site of a shooting is ten to the power of Liberia’s national deficit, but of course everyone wants to be safe from THE BOOGEYMAN! Dramatic Chord
In other news, Pope evacuates bowels in wooded area, Film at 11…
Many years ago, this side of the pond ,there was a slogan "have a go " the nub of which was if anyone held up the bank ,shop or whatever premises that you and other members of the public happened to be in it was considered good citizenship to attack and/or chase the bad guys .the papers regulary had accounts of quote, "Have a go heroes "unquote , a surprising number still actually alive after the editions had gone to press! A big difference to the current situation though was the very real rarity of gun crime in the u.k. at that time ,even today it is less common here then in the U.S. but depressingly seems to be fast catching up.I think if its a case of a relatively cool headed group of proffessional criminals only interested in getting the money and making their getaway with as few problems as possible , then yes it is the best policy to cooperate,but with terrorists,nutcases and Walter Mittys trying to make a name for themselves its probably more a case of when ,rather then if ,youre going to die .Human nature being what it is though; many of us caught in that situation would still be experiencing an illogical hope that WE are going to get through it alright even if the others wont!(Always assuming that were not paralysed with terror anyway !)
I don’t think kids need expensive training to know that if a teacher runs in panicing and shouting “Run, kids! There’s a madman with a gun!” that it’s a good idea to, well, run.
