After All This
February 20, 2025 at 09:36PMDana Salvador’s essay for The Sun is a vivid autobiography of the educator as emergency responder. “Every day I lock my classroom door,” she writes. “It’s both a school policy and a time-saver in case there’s an active shooter. Every day I know I could be shot.” Salvador weaves short, devastating passages on the history of school shootings in America with wary, present-tense observations gathered during her twenty-five years as a teacher, from hushed lockdowns to flawed escape routes. It is difficult, reading Salvador’s essay, to think of teachers and the children they care for–mine, yours–as anything other than vulnerable to one of America’s greatest ills and the callousness that enables it.
At my first job, in a large, urban high school, the principal and assistants went around one day and scoured each room. They asked the teachers if we’d seen anything suspicious. I learned later they were looking for a bomb.
At that same high school a boy walked with a weapon under his shirt into the principal’s office and demanded to see him immediately, frantically. Once inside his office, the boy laid a handgun on the desk. Said he’d found it in a trash can in the boys’ restroom. He didn’t know what else to do.
The fall before my sons entered ninth grade, there were three incidents involving guns at the high school in our neighborhood in Albuquerque, New Mexico: A student was shot dead next to the football field while fighting over the ghost gun he’d stolen from another student. A gun accidently fired when it dropped from a student’s waistband, luckily injuring no one; the student ran from the classroom, and police apprehended him in a nearby park. Two guns were found in a kid’s backpack.
In other schools across the city eleven guns were discovered during the first semester.
These are the guns they found, the guns the district is willing to tell us about.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/02/20/after-all-this/
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