And that's what I will be advocating.
After Beslan, at least one major urban school district I know of decided that lockdown and terrorism threats were to be handled like so: students were to line up, even high schoolers, and proceed quietly 900 yards from the school. Drills were held. Still are.
I will say, too, that it is really, really strange to see one of those ‘gun free’ signs at various places: schools, government buildings, malls. I blow past them now and don’t give them a second thought. But for the life of me, I have always wondered why people think a sign that effectively says, “because I say so,” is going to stop evil intent. Life doesn’t have ‘Ollie Ollie in free’ zones, except a man’s castle, and then, only mostly.
For decades, we here have lived, many of us, with the confidence of a man of the flying trapeze who has never needed a net. Gun free zones feed that naïve notion. It’s naivete to an extreme. We have no guarantee of safety to assume that gun free zones are places where each person will always be unarmed or unwilling to commit harm. Such assumptions cost lives.
An unfinished fairy tale:
We can live in the fanciful, peaceful, Emerald City of Oz no longer. Banning guns puts us in the Witch’s castle as part of her troops of winkies. S/he’s already set her flying monkey media and ‘organizer’ winkies in motion. Will Oz ‘surrender’ Dorothy and her ruby slippers: our power, self-protection and armor?