It has been a while since I paid any attention to this blog, and I wanted to write a few lines. This blog was written first as a requirement for a course, then as a reflection to my learning and as a repository to what I thought of others work. Fast forward a year and a half or so, and now I'm graduated from my program, and after a little search, got a new job with an upgrade to my salary, and I'm now helping to create a new wave of online courses for the government. These courses are to get people back to work as quickly as possible and not for training to harm others or something like that (I'm a pacifist).
Thinking along those lines, many of my past classmates were teachers, and I'm sure the Newtown tragedy has touched them very deeply also. I was specially shocked that most of the victims were from first grade, but somehow I know that from the moment they mentioned that the mother of the perpetrator was a kindergarten teacher. I'm sure many of the victims were part of her class the year before...
The big question then is, could this have been prevented? I heard about the proposal of putting guards in all public schools, and I thought to myself that it was a patch and not a real solution. We are always fixing things after the fact, and never preventing things from happening. Did everyone forget that the perpetrator was once a first grader himself? Could certain things in his life could have been changed and perhaps instead of shooting children, he would have been studying to be a great teacher himself? I would love comments from fellow teachers and hear their opinions on this matter.
The other day I heard someone say that if the teachers had guns, that the tragedy could have been minimized or prevented. I'm sure a lot of my old classmates would think this as stupid, and I'm not so sure if I want to send my kids to a trained killer (you have to train to use a gun effectively) that would kill with almost no provocation or remorse a young adult in front of children, and willing to have an O.K. Corral shootout in the classroom to boot, as I'm sure that it would have not ended with one shot. And let's say that a teacher hears shots in the school, gets a gun and as the perpetrator walks in, he gets shot and dies. What about that teacher that just shot and killed another human being? Do people really think that is a piece of cake to live with? I'm an Army veteran, so I know a little about having blood on my hands. The teacher will need therapy as a minimum. And would it have been better if the perpetrator have gotten therapy before he stole the guns from his mother, and shot her with them? Actually if you think about it, it was because a teacher did get a gun that this tragedy happened. Sure, let's give guns to all the teachers; lets see how many kids and troubled young adults steal those same guns to commit more murders...
