American Kids Are Now Singing Lullabies about School Shootings
What would Mother Goose say?
To the tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,” school shooting protocol is being taught to kindergartners in Massachusetts. The clever rhyme is sung so the children “know what to do” if their school is turned into a war zone. It goes:
Lockdown, lockdown, Lock the door
Shut the lights off, Say no more
Go behind the desk and hide
Wait until it’s safe inside
Lockdown, lockdown it’s all done
Now it’s time to have some fun!
Fun, indeed. I find myself reading these words over and over again. Their existence—the need to have constructed this arrangement—gives me the chills. America is a nation where we teach our young ones emergency procedures via a soothing lullaby meant to put them to sleep. There’s a sentence to be proud of.
Now, the school or the teacher should not draw our condemnation. At the end of the day, they’re just American teachers (who get paid like shit) trying to get a bunch of children to understand that their heads could get blown off at their school without getting too “real.”
The parents and (grandparents) of these children are the ones who should draw our ire. They, ultimately, are the ones who have allowed for this nonsense to fester. Under their watch, there has been a significant rise in school shootings and gun violence writ large. A 2018 study published in Springer’s Journal of Child and Family Studies discovered as much. The lead author Antonis Katsiyannis found:
In less than 18 years, we have already seen more deaths related to school shootings than in the whole 20th century.
This fits anecdotally with what we’re all seeing and reading about. But there are many people who believe the opposite. They usually cite the work of James Alen Fox, a criminologist from Northeastern University, whose research showed that mass shootings in schools were actually down since the 1990s. “The growing menace lies more in our fears than in the facts,” he has claimed.
I had completely forgotten about Fox’s study, until David Brooks took to MSNBC’s Meet The Press:
The number of school shootings has plummeted since the 1990s. Schools are about the safest place a child can be. And so we shouldn’t get carried away about that.
In a moment of national decay, it’s good to see Brooks paying attention to what really ails us: the overhyping of school shootings. Jabs of the New York Times columnist aside, this claim (and the study) about school shootings is incredibly dubious, for a number of reasons. Here’s a big one according to Amy Cohen, Deborah Azrael and Matthew Miller:
[Fox’s conclusions are] based on a misguided approach to studying the problem: The data he uses includes all homicides in which four or more people were murdered with a gun. His analysis, which counts the number of events per year, lumps together mass shootings in public places with a far more numerous set of mass murders that are contextually distinct — a majority of which stem from domestic violence and occur in private homes.
All of this discussion ultimately feels like it’s missing the point, though. Regardless of the rate at which these mass shootings are happening, our energy and attention needs to be on ending this state of affairs—to put it euphemistically.
It’s 2018 and our most vulnerable citizens have to look up at this every day in their classroom.
The absurdity of that poster cannot be lost on anyone who has an ounce of sanity. America is the only nation on earth where gun violence like this happens with such regularity. And if you dispute that claim, and say I’m lying, then you know what? Let’s lift the federal ban on gun violence research so we can settle this debate for good! I’m sick of having it. And I am not afraid of the potential results.
It’s time for us, the grown ups, to end this nightmare. To help us do that, I’ve put together a little tune for us so that we can remember whenever we forget our ways:
Hey adults it’s us your kids
In our classroom full of bliss
What’s this poster on our wall?
Does it mean he’ll kill us all?
Hey adults it’s us your kids
Fuck this stupid rhyme, get your shit together, and start electing politicians who prioritize gun reform. Only then will we get close to ending this horrific chapter in America’s history.
Admittedly, I need to make the ending a little bit punchier, but you get the gist. Enough is enough.
