Open letter to Arlington, Virginia P.S. superintendent on acquiescing to gun violence

Notably missing from the letter was any sense of anger. Indeed, you take pride that it is with "calmer minds" that you "regularly debrief after something happens" (the "something", luckily for us so far, not yet being a gun massacre).

Your inane acquiescence to a national pathology not only fails to reassure, it offends. I cannot be the only Arlington parent or teacher who is incensed that my children are forced to engage in lock-down drills. When kids are in elementary school it is appalling that adults should terrorize them this way. In middle and high school, meanwhile, they are already old enough to be tough-minded, even jaded. On one hand, they are likely still distraught that maniacs can buy weapons to come murder them and their classmates. On the other, though, they are mature enough to push this threat to the back of their minds (it is a statistically small one, after all) and to treat the security farce as the morbid joke it is, the procedural pantomime and ass-covering of adults who, as in many things, alas, are just going through the motions.

Teenagers can't always be expected to respect us. For this cravenness, though, this milquetoast mewling that "safety is always a top priority in our schools", we really deserve their outright contempt. That is why the words and actions of those Parkland students have been such a tonic -- they do not find their tragedy "unspeakable": they are speaking quite loudly, "calling B.S." and exposing our failure. All parents have the nightmare fear of not being able to protect their children from harm, be it from accident or malice. That should animate us against the proliferation of guns, but we should likewise be concerned, as a matter of dignity, that our children not see us humiliated, helpless and hypocritical.

Our schools might hum along with nary of rivulet of blood in their corridors. But they are islands in a sea of guns. "The worst are full of passionate intensity" and a millions-strong minority of the country insist that those guns be everywhere, that all of us, down to the age of eighteen, perhaps soon younger, be under arms and on a hair trigger. Even just now we have had to recalibrate our outrage with the news that the head of the NRA and his President of the United States have advanced the dystopian notion that our schoolteachers be armed. This is not what our educators trained for. The problem here is not inadequate "procedures". It is guns, their owners and their politics.

We can't be self-respecting, much less secure, until we begin to remove guns from this community, in solidarity with other communities. The Parkland and Sandy Hook killers (the media often prefer the nonchalant locution "shooters", as if they were sportsmen) legally possessed the weapons with which they massacred them, under the supervision of parents who considered themselves "responsible gun owners". It has been a generation since Columbine, so those schools already had "procedures" and were therefore "safe"...until they weren't.

It should be our task to reduce gun ownership in the APS district, even in the face of the legal protections it has nationally. As part of that effort we should seek to keep tabs on guns in practice and publicize gun ownership as dangerous and socially disreputable, like smoking. Indeed, one of the tactics of the gun lobby and its allies in Congress is to prevent the federal government from treating gun violence as a public health issue by compiling statistics on gun deaths and accidents. I therefore recommend that APS distribute questionnaires to all parents asking whether they keep guns in their homes, how many, and what kind. As it would violate the privacy of gun owners to publish their names, we could instead publish only those who consent to make public their responses to the questionnaire. By simple deduction, we would therefore know who represents a risk to the community through owning guns. At the very least, this would place a stigma on any Arlingtonians who make school massacres more likely through their choices, who conceal an anti-social, potentially lethal fetish behind outward neighborliness. If they don't like it they can home-school their kids and substitute shooting range practice for 11:00 trigonometry.

If you are unwilling to directly address the problem of guns, Mr. Murphy, then please at least promote voter registration on school grounds so that APS students can do it instead.

Don't ask that kids lock themselves down until the tide of insanity recedes. The grief-stricken, furious, psychically maimed victims of Parkland have no "calmer minds" to return to. Demonstrate solidarity with them, and with the children in your charge, because the other side -- the NRA and their allies -- show utter singlemindedness in their cause. In the wake of these mass killings they buy AR-15's. They torment the victims and their families, trying to taunt bereft parents into silence, if not suicide. They are doing it now, desecrating the dead and defaming the survivors as "crisis actors" with the endorsement of our ruling Republican Party and its President. Don't ask our kids to hide. Support them if they walk out of school. As the ones in Parkland said, "if you're not with us, you're against us." Pick a side and fight as though our children's lives depended on it.

Respectfully,