Listening sessions

I’ve been watching students on the news. I appreciate what they’ve been through as much as someone who hasn’t been through it could. Our school practices lockdown drills, and every time we run one, I lament that today’s school world must include them.

On the other hand, my classmates and I were first graders when we practiced waiting under our desks for hydrogen bombs.

The world has always been a troubled place.

I commend the students for their citizenship. I was concerned when some speakers oversimplified issues, and when some seemed unable to recognize that voices on the other side can hold sincere beliefs, too. I was concerned when a few spoke glibly about revolution, rhetoric I find as inappropriate as glibly offering thoughts and prayers.

I was concerned that spotlighting the students would encourage the narcissism that already characterizes American life. We need to help them hold on to perspective. The mayhem at Parkland was the stuff of nightmares, but so is a school day in Syria or a schoolgirl’s night in Chibok.

Still, their grievance is legitimate. Too many in their government have failed them by prizing the succor of the gun lobby above the safety of their constituents. Students can be excused their stridency and missteps because they’re children. It’s our job to teach them how to blend courage, humility, tolerance, and perseverance in a just cause.

We adults don’t have their excuse.

I watched two NRA leaders address supporters.

My experience with the NRA had been limited to neighbors and some of my students who’ve been hunters and members over the years. As for the Second Amendment, while I endorse a constitutionally protected, individual right to own firearms, I believe we’ve lived too long in thrall to an extreme interpretation of that amendment, embraced and funded by a minority of Americans.

What I heard from the NRA today goes beyond divergent interpretations of the Constitution. Even a year into the Trump administration, I have rarely heard such malice, distortions, and vitriol issue from a public speaker’s mouth. No, the media don’t “love mass shootings.” No, supporting a ban on assault weapons doesn’t make you a socialist. No, calling for closer regulation of guns when the word “well-regulated” appears in the amendment doesn’t mean you “hate individual freedom.”

I draw no conclusions about the virtue or opinions of its individual members, but I heard enough today to determine for myself that the NRA as an organization is not a force for good.

I watched President Trump.

His “listening session” proved less tightly choreographed than I expected. The citizens gathered there expressed a variety of views. Their suffering, desperation, and anger were apparent.

Some suggested training teachers and children to recognize and deal with disturbed students. There are likely cases where this would help, but no workshop training will make me a diagnostician. Besides, schools have grown extraordinarily sensitive, often oversensitive when it comes to behaviorally aberrant students, a preoccupation that’s further disrupted classrooms. Although some troubled students remain undetected, we know who many are, and we still can’t help them or protect our students from them.

President Trump voiced support for raising the minimum age to purchase assault weapons from eighteen to twenty-one. This would prevent student assailants from buying their own weapons, but it wouldn’t stop them from bringing guns from their parents’ homes, which is where most already find them. The President endorsed what he calls “strong background checks,” without mentioning waiting periods and private sale loopholes. He also proposed “focusing very strongly on mental health,” without noting that his budget reduced funding for school safety and mental health programs.

He was most enthusiastic about arming “highly adept” teachers, of which he insists “there are many.” Displaying his customary lack of expertise and disdain for reality, he literally envisions a school where General Kelly, armed with a gun, is your history teacher, “teaching about how we win wars,” and the rest of the faculty includes “other friends of his from the Marines.”

The problem is I’m actually your history teacher. Ten, twenty, or forty percent of our faculty, the President’s various estimates, wouldn’t be “more comfortable” carrying firearms, or any more effective than I’d be. There’s also no surplus of military veterans qualified or hungering to teach.

At another moment he speculated that it would require 100 to 150 security guards to protect a school campus, and that this “would look terrible” and cost too much. Naturally, he’d offer teachers “a little bonus” to wield lethal weapons. He’s confident we’d “love getting that bonus.”

I don’t share the President’s glee at “bullets flying in the other direction.” If the only way we can safeguard our children against being murdered in their classrooms is to arm teachers, it doesn’t just look terrible. It is terrible.

The President talks about “hardening” schools to scare away “sicko shooters.” He cites the Parkland killer’s attempt to escape as evidence that “they’re all cowards” without noting that most school shooters expect to kill and be killed. He also blames videogames, movies, a scarcity of mental hospitals, and his predecessors in the Oval Office, all of whom allegedly “took no action” to deal with school shootings.

He appears to have considered every aspect of the gun problem except guns.

The rest of the world has crazy people, too.

They don’t, however, have as many guns.

PETER BERGER