When was the last time you had to do an active shooter drill?
on phone bans, again. (sorry if this is a completely incoherent ramble)
If you’ve been in school in the past 10-15 years, you’ve done an active shooter drill, or maybe you’ve even experienced an actual lockdown.
If you have, you know how insane these drills are. You run into a corner and lock the door. A locked door won’t stop an AR-15. even if some chairs block it.
So what will?
“The solution to School shootings is clearly banning phones.” - A parent, discussing the need for cell phone bans
Cell phone bans that actually make schools LESS safe.
But are advocated for in the name of safety
Just like school resource officers, who raise the fatality rate by 2.8% in shooting events
(https://studentsdemandaction.org/report/address-the-presence-of-school-resource-officers-in-your-school/)
We keep proposing these harmful solutions.
Because the people proposing them haven't experienced the problems.
I say fuck that.
If you can ban a fucking phone in a school.
You can ban a gun.
But the people making these decisions, Governors, School board members, senators, even these parents, for the most part, have not grown up in this world. They have not grown up in a world where a school shooting happens nearly every week. They didn’t have to do shooting drills. These Decision makers weren’t in school during COVID, They haven’t had to deal with the constant anxiety and all the pressures of this changing world. They haven’t had to grapple with the constant failure by the people in power meant to protect us, which we have to deal with.
So I ask again,
When was the last time you did an active shooter drill?
When was the last time you sat in a high school classroom?
When was the last time you grew up while the democratic institutions of your country collapsed?
Oh? never? Ok.
Then what makes you think you know how WE feel?
Because we deal with all of this, and so much more, every day.
But you don’t understand that. All you do is continue to fail us, to ignore us, To Silence us.
And you silence us with the thoughts of a man who knows not the difference between correlation and causation.
For more on Jonathan Haidt, check out this piece:
You want to ban phones, but you won’t ban guns.
Because, to qoute micheal jackson, “they don’t really care about us”
You care about controlling us and silencing us.
Why are the youth being ignored here?
Do our voices not matter?
When it is OUR Lives being affected.
I will not be ignored.
WE will not be ignored.
We will fight back
Because you can blame phones all you want,
But the problem is, and always will be, the people in power failing us.
