A 6-Year-Old Shot Their Teacher

The story, in a nutshell, is that a 6-year-old took their mother's gun to school and shot their teacher. The teacher-hero is in critical condition.

There are people calling for throwing the book at the parent(s). The child, who is simply too young to understand the ramifications of his actions, is already severely traumatized. I doubt it would be improved by putting his mother in prison. Someone was certainly negligent, but it wasn't just the parent, it was all of us for allowing our society to devolve to the point that there are guns everywhere, and 6-year-olds not only have access to them, but know how to point them and squeeze the trigger.

Others are blaming the school, an elementary school that already puts kids through metal detectors. There are already calls for more armed officers and a further ramping up of the prison-ification of America's schools.

We live in an era when comedy shows often do better journalism than actual journalists. In an episode of Last Week Tonight that aired in the aftermath of the Uvalde shooting, host John Oliver, after a detailed half hour on why armed policing of schools is a failed idea, got to the heart of the matter (excuse the language, although I believe in this case it is warranted):

What it means is asking ourselves, "What really keeps kids safe?" And I would argue that one good way to do that might be to take the money that we are inevitably about the flood toward school cops and instead direct it to counselors, nurses, and all the other resources that actually protect students. School police are not the answer to school shootings. The answer to that is gun control. And when we throw more cops into schools as an easy way out of that difficult and necessary conversation, we not only fail to keep our kids safe from gun violence, we condemn them to a system that criminalizes the very essence of childhood. Kids deserve to be annoying without being arrested; to be sad and angry without being body slammed; they deserve to have tantrums, throw carrots, and do science experiments, to talk sh*t, and to carve their name into stuff without risking ending up in the back of a police car. They deserve to be curious, to make mistakes, to go a little too far, to be a little too loud, to basically be a f**king kid. And they definitely deserve better than the fundamental lie that the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy who can arrest a five-year-old.

To that I would add, they shouldn't have easy access to guns in their homes. The answer is common sense gun laws, not day prisons for our children.

We've been here before. We've all heard that other nations have solved the problem of school shootings by dramatically limiting access to guns. We all know that when the Clinton administration banned assault-style weapons in 1994, shooting fatalities fell by 70 percent. Most of us know that if you live in a state with stricter gun control measures, you are safer from gun violence than you are in states that have lax gun laws. Of course, we could do more for mental health in our country, but the common sense first step is clearly to make guns very difficult to acquire.

As I've written before, as educators we have the power to make common sense gun laws happen, but only if we choose to use it. We are involuntarily on the front lines of this literal war against common sense. We have the power to compel change. What if we all agreed to simply not return to school until Congress passes common sense gun laws, the same laws that have worked everywhere they have been tried? We shouldn't have to worry about guns in schools at all, let alone arriving in the backpacks of kindergarteners.

I urge everyone, including Congress, to take a moment to watch John Oliver's full segment:

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"Teacher Tom, our caped hero of all things righteous in the early childhood world, inspires us to be heroic in our own work with young children, and reminds us that it is the children who are the heroes of the story as they embark on adventures of discovery, wonder, democracy, and play." ~Rusty Keeler

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