Bullet Points

When the loudspeaker crackled on and announced that our school was having an active shooter drill and we were to go into lockdown, I whispered the word “fuck” from the shot of adrenaline to my heart in front of my class of 37 ninth-grade students. This was hilarious, at least if you are 15 years old.

My classroom doesn’t have windows, so when we turn out the lights, you can’t see a foot in front of your face. This is also very funny to my students. Who might be kissing in the dark? We had better all giggle about it.

Lockdown procedure calls for absolute silence, a protocol that my students took as a mild suggestion. I hissed at them to turn off their phones and close their mouths.

So we sat in the dark and the silence imagining what if a mass murderer with the means to kills hundreds of people in a matter of minutes were loose in our school. Where would the bullets hit us? In the leg, in the face, in the gut? What does a pool of real blood look like? Is it the same as in the movies? Who would get lucky? Who would sacrifice themselves? Whose parents were in for the worst phone call of their lives?

A sharp bang and a rattle burst from my classroom door and caught my heart and hooked it up into my throat: some anonymous administrator, checking to make sure that the lock was secure. I thought about how the door would make that same sound if the person on the other side of it had a gun. None of my students laughed at this.

Later that afternoon, our faculty had “Surviving an Active Shooter” training in the auditorium. A Houston Police Department specialist in mass shootings delivered some bullet-point tips on what we could do to protect ourselves and our students:

• Consider what everyday classroom items could be used as deadly weapons to defend against your attacker. That red pen you use to grade student essays is capable of paralyzing a man if applied to the spinal column. The scissors you had on your desk for cutting off the bottom halves of permission slips should be stabbed into the attacker’s shooting arm.
• After you have taken down the attacker through grievous bodily injury, take the plastic bag from your trashcan and wrap it around his head to cut off oxygen and minimize the chances of him getting back up.
• Be prepared to practice first-aid until emergency services arrive. A computer cord can be used as a makeshift tourniquet. A thin piece of plastic – say, a candy wrapper – could be used to slow the blood loss from a child’s sucking chest wound.
• Try to do all of this without the use of your hands. Police officers are trained to see hands as a threat, so make sure that yours are empty and held up so that you are not mistaken for the active shooter.
• “You may be handcuffed – be cool!”
• “Be prepared to see dead bodies as you exit – be cool!”

Implicit in all of this advice and in the lockdown drill was the assumption that our protocol for protecting our children from lunatics with guns kicks in after they have stepped foot on campus. Teachers – not gun owners, not the firearms industry, not legislators – are being asked to shoulder the burden of reckoning with the perfect storm caused by white, male entitlement and massacre-grade weaponry.

I think that the sound of the door handle rattling as we imagined our deaths will stay with me for the rest of my life. I keep wondering, if there were really a shooter, would the door hold? There ought to be a lot more than a flimsy piece of plywood standing between a killer and our kids.