Instead of Gun Control, We’re Teaching Kids Nursery Rhymes About How to Not Get Shot

There was a fairly disturbing viral tweet that made it’s rounds on Twitter this week when a mother posted a picture of the active shooter drill instructions, set to the tune of ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” from the kindergarten class her child will be attending in the fall.

This should not be hanging in my soon-to-be-kindergartener’s classroom. pic.twitter.com/mWiJVdddpH

— Georgy Cohen (@radiofreegeorgy) June 6, 2018

This is disturbing, but perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising. This is where we are as a society. There were over 30 school shootings this past school year in the United States, and 58 fatalities. And we just don’t seem to care anymore. We’d rather attack the survivors of school shootings than have actual, needed gun control. When “accidental” white supremacist Congressman Steve Scalise was shot and almost killed, he basically apologized to the NRA for making guns look bad.

I’m really at a loss for what to say here. We know what needs to be done and we also know we’re not going to do it. We’re okay, as a society, with school children being killed by their classmates as long as we get to play with guns. We’ll look for any excuse we can find from violent video games to fluoride in the water to not look at the cold hard data that this does not happen in countries that don’t have the free and easy access to guns that we do in the United States.

So this is the world we live in now. A couple of months ago, there was a story about how some drills teach very young children that if there’s a shooter in their room, they should run around and throw books at the shooter, and with it the sinking realization that we’re basically asking children to sacrifice themselves to distract the shooter who is absolutely going to kill them to buy other classrooms more time to get away. A Pennsylvania school district arming children with buckets of rocks is seemingly working under the same principle.

Or we could ban guns. That’s always an option. We could repeal the Second Amendment to the Constitution and have a full ban on handguns and semi-automatic weapons, along with reasonable restrictions on legitimate hunting rifles. That’s what they’ve done in all the countries that don’t have regular school shootings. But we won’t do it. Because we feel, uniquely in the world, that a few hundred dead children is a price worth paying for our cool gun hobby.