School shootings and classroom drills

We did a lockdown drill on a Thursday in September because the calendar said so, not because anyone had a threat, and I stood in the corner of room 214 with 28 kids who were trying to be cool about crouching. One of them, Jayden, whispered "this is dumb" and I almost agreed, except I remember Parkland the way other people remember a game. I was student-teaching then. I watched the coverage in a lounge with a vending machine that ate dollar bills. I thought, they are never going to ask us to teach sonnets like the sonnets are the point.

The point, apparently, is to practice dying quietly enough that a man with a rifle might pass the door. That sentence is mean. It is also what the choreography is. Lights off, away from glass, don't pile in front of the door like a gift. I have a roster. I have a kid who panics. I have a kid who thinks it's funny. I am supposed to be the adult. I am 34 and I still flinch when a balloon pops at the pep rally.

I am not confused about what I want. I want fewer rifles designed to empty a magazine into a crowd to be a normal purchase for a 19-year-old who is not okay. I want the waiting period. I want the red flag that is more than a press conference. I want the loophole people pretend isn't a door. I want this the way I want the fire code: boring, enforced, not a personality.

My cousin Devin in Valdosta carries in his truck because he cuts timber and he has seen feral dogs and he has also seen men. He is not a school shooter. If your gun bill is written like Devin is the specimen, Devin is going to vote like you hate him, and then I lose the legislature, and then I am still crouching in 214. I am trying to be honest about that math even though the math makes some of my group-chat friends treat me like I've gone soft.

I have not gone soft. I have gone tired of losing in a way that feels righteous. Righteous is not a lock on my door. Our door sticks, by the way. The district had a vendor. The vendor had a slide deck. The door still sticks. If I sound like a man obsessed with a door, good. Doors are the part we could do while we argue the Second Amendment into dust.

The Second Amendment is not a rumor. It is in the document. The people who talk as if it were a rumor make me change the channel, and I say that as someone who wants a ban on the rifles we all mean when we say AR, even if the naming fight is stupid. Call it a semiautomatic rifle with a detachable magazine and a pistol grip and stop doing the hobbyist quiz. The quiz is how the bill dies in committee while I laminate another drill card.

After Uvalde I sat in my car in the teacher lot and called my mother in Birmingham because I needed to hear a kitchen. She said, they always do this after, then they don't. She was not being profound. She was being from Alabama. I hate that she was right. I hate that "they" includes voters like my uncle who thinks a school shooting is a mental-health problem exclusively, as if mental health were a faucet and we just forgot the washer. Mental health is a real faucet. It is also not a rifle with a bump stock's cousin at a sporting goods store on a Saturday.

Students write about this without being asked. They put it in personal essays next to grandma and the divorce. A girl last year wrote that she knows which classmate she would hide behind. I had to sit with that paper for a minute before I could write a comment about her thesis. Her thesis was fine. The hiding-behind was the part the rubric doesn't grade.

Does arming teachers make me safer. No. I am not a deputy. I lose my keys. The fantasy of Mr. Whitfield drawing down in a crowded hallway is a fantasy for people who do not know hallways. A hallway is backpacks and a kid with headphones and a spill. You want a cop, hire a cop, and even then I am not going to pretend a good guy with a gun is a plan. It is a hope. We do hopes at pep rallies.

I will give the rural carry people this: Atlanta traffic is not Appling County, and a pistol on a farm is not my 2nd period. National rules that ignore that will fail the way national fast food fails regional taste — they will still exist, they will just be resented. So write the rifle bill like you have been to both places. Visit a range with Devin. Visit my drill. If you only visit one, you are a tourist with a take.

The exhaustion I cannot shake is the cycle of faces. A superintendent's statement. A moment of silence that is not silent because the HVAC is loud. Then a committee. Then nothing that would have changed the purchase. I don't need a speaker to get shot for the body to grow a spine. That is a grotesque sentence and I am leaving it in, because the grotesque is already in the building.

I teach Baldwin and I teach the kids who think Baldwin is homework. I am not using this space to say literature will save us. Literature will not save us. A legislature might, if it were less afraid of a primary than of a funeral. That is an ugly way to put the incentive. Ugly is accurate.

On Friday we had a threat that turned out to be a kid's bad joke on an app. We still did the protocol. Parents still came early. I still stood in the corner. The joke was not funny. The protocol was not nothing. I am trying to live in the space where a joke can be punished and a rifle can be harder to get, without turning Devin into a stranger. If that is too much for the parties, the parties are too little for a school.

Third period is Julius Caesar this week. Irony is doing a lot of work. The kids know. They always know. They just don't have a vote that matches the drill.