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Francis: The People’s Pope

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Ted Rall

Publication Date: March 13, 2018

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He thought his church career was drawing to a close. Then he was asked to take over a Catholic Church in crisis.

Religiosity was in decline in the West. And the Catholic Church was in bigger trouble than any other institution you could think of. Losing parishioners, shrinking in power and prestige and discredited by corruption and sex scandals, a 2000-year-old church that traces its origins to Saint Peter was on the ropes, in danger of losing its viability everywhere but Latin America.

So the council of cardinals turned to Latin America for its savior. Francis brought newfound humility, transparency and charisma to a church that desperately needed it…but first he had to answer some hard questions about the sins that came with his rise to power.

Current Events/Biography, 2017
Seven Stories Press Paperback, 5″x7″, 192 pp., $16.95

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Guest Post: Those Adam Lanza Eyes

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Ted Rall

The following guest post is by a teacher at an American high school who has requested anonymity. As should be obvious, these opinions are not mine. In other words, I may agree with them. I may not. That’s not the point. I’m putting this here to add to the current discussion over school shootings.

A dark mentality lurks behind Adam Lanza eyes.  Something is dead in the people who take weapons to schools to shoot staff and students and we need to develop an unyielding standard about it.

Nicholas Cruz was an earthquake-in-the-making.  The burning question is why he was not stopped before that Uber ever dropped him off at Stoneman Parkland.  Adults apparently did nothing about this kid except kick him out of school.  At the expense of seventeen lives, Cruz was allowed to run amok while avoiding a criminal record.

We need the collective will to do something about these murderers-in-training.  The argument can be made that we don’t have to wait for school shooters to kill lots of kids and teachers before removing them from our midst.  It’s not a hard argument to make.  The elements of an impending bloodbath are by now well-known: persistent talk of guns, shooting, and death; holding other school shooters in high esteem.  There is no misunderstanding kids who pose with pics of guns and knives.  To read these pics of kids dabbling with weapons as child’s play is willfully to misinterpret.  There is no doubting the intentions.  Followed to its conclusion is mass murder.

There’s even a template for involuntary committal:  kill some animals, make some threats, and post disturbing pictures on instagram, and the balance has been tipped.  When people, even kids, especially these kids, are this transparent, they forfeit the right to live among us.  The consequence is proportionate to the threat.

My school has a student with Adam Lanza eyes.  Disturbing pictures show up on his instagram.  This student makes everyone nervous; however, as of yet, he has done nothing.  So administrators do what administrators typically do: shuffle his schedule and get him special education services.  He becomes untouchable.  His nonsense becomes part of his disability and we are forced to tolerate it.

Sometimes the collective good trumps the individual.  The individual cannot reign supreme when it comes to mass murder.  When it comes to mass murder, we need to be a little less careful about the rights of one person and a little more careful of accepting the dangerously anti-social and criminally insane into our communities. Things that are at odds with a conventional lifestyle always attract attention, but they don’t necessarily warrant committal.  Someone can be at odds with convention and still live among us; however, if you give yourself over to the study of mass shootings, sit in your room playing video games all day with the windows blacked out like Adam Lanza, then we are not going to tolerate you.

Toleration means the limits of what we can accept.  Mass murder of children should cross that threshold of acceptance.  We need to err on the side of caution because we don’t want another first grade class murdered.  Adults need to grasp that kids who are focused on killing present a lethal threat.  They have no claim to our toleration.

Adults need to recognize the signs of disturbing destructiveness in kids and do something about them.  Sheriff Scott Israel of Broward County had said before the shooting that he would “measure his success by how many young people he kept out of jail.”  His standards were weak and ultimately catastrophic.  When you signal to people that you’re not going to put them in jail, they will think, “I’m good, I can do what I want.”

The argument that banning certain types of guns will stop school killings is alluring, but false.  In May, 2014, Maren Sanchez was fatally stabbed, nay, butchered, by classmate Christopher Plaskon at nine in the morning at Jonathan Law High School in Milford, Connecticut because she turned him down for prom. Granted, it was not a mass killing, but surely Maren’s life mattered to her and her family and Christopher Plaskon had been reported to school administrators for threatening her.  Those administrators did nothing.

We are not removing someone from our public schools because we disapprove of them; we are making the case for the rights of our school community.  We reduce to insignificance the teachers-turned-martyrs and Sandy Hook first graders when we continue to allow the criminally insane in our schools.  When your fellow students are afraid to the point that they go to their teachers and counselors about you, when you raise questions about yourself to your peers, you have not earned a prison sentence.  But you have lost the right to move freely among us.

My mother was a registered nurse and as part of her training, she worked with the criminally insane at a psychiatric hospital.  She let her guard down once, giving a patient a fork, and was almost stabbed.  It was then that she realized that some people were untreatable.  My mother hated that part of her training.  “They [the patients] were sneaky, cunning, and untrustworthy,” she said.  “They could never be let out.”

They have been let out.  Society has become a mental ward.  Closing the asylums was an act of insanity.  Sociologist Rael Jean Isaac and journalist Virginia C. Arnett in Madness in the Streets (1990) insist that it is too simplistic to blame President Reagan for closing mental institutions in the 1980s and that deeper causes in the culture were at play.  Their work calumnies lawyers who worked to eliminate involuntary commitment laws as part of the 1960s civil rights movement.  These authors support the involuntary commitment of the mentally ill.  The mentally ill cannot always be treated in the community.

The road since Columbine has been a bloody one: little children from Newtown, Connecticut; a young woman from Milford, Connecticut; now teenagers in Parkland, Florida; and lots of teachers.  Banning the AR-15 will not get us out of this.  It is impossible to remove guns from American life, but it is not impossible to stop the killings.  The tale that we have been telling ourselves, that the criminally insane can be treated as outpatients, is a fairy tale.  It needs to become easier to treat someone without their consent.  Bring back the asylum.

—A Message from American Teacher

Order a Personally-Signed Copy of “Francis: The People’s Pope” Now!

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Ted Rall

It’s here: the latest in my critically-acclaimed series of graphic novel-format biographies (Snowden, Bernie, Trump). Now it’s Francis: The People’s Pope!

Whether you’re Catholic or not, here’s the inspiring story of how that most unlikely of changemakers is transforming international politics. Includes a history and analysis of Roman Catholicism and Christian ethics and politics, church organization and the mess that Francis found when he became pontiff five years ago.

Order a personally-signed copy either for yourself or as a gift:


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Shoutout: Does Anyone Know the #NeverAgain Student Leaders?

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Ted Rall

I’m working on a book about the #NeverAgain movement. I need to contact and interview some of the student leaders and survivors from Parkland, Florida who are working as activists. But I’m having trouble contacting them.

If you are in touch with any of these student activists, can you please let me know? I’m at rall.com/contact.

Thanks!

Ted

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Divide and Conquer — Why Does the U.S. Hate Peace?

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Ted Rall

Give peace a chance, the song urges.

But the United States won’t have it.

Olympic diplomacy seems to be working on the Korean peninsula. After a pair of South Korean envoys visited Pyongyang, they issued a promising communiqué. “The North Korean side clearly stated its willingness to denuclearize,” the statement said. Considering that the Korean crisis and a derpy emergency management official had Hawaiians jumping down manholes a few months ago, this news comes as a relief.

Then comes the rub. The South Korean statement continued: “[North Korea] made it clear that it would have no reason to keep nuclear weapons if the military threat to the North was eliminated and its security guaranteed [my emphasis].”

In other words, the DPRK is saying — reasonably — we’ll get rid of our nukes but only if you promise not to invade us. That guarantee would have to be issued by two countries: South Korea and the United States.

This would directly contradict long-standing U.S. foreign policy, which clearly and repeatedly states that the use of military force is always on the table when we don’t get our way in an international dispute.

Kim Jong-On has good reasons to be afraid of us. In a speech to the UN President Trump threatened to “totally destroy” North Korea. President George W. Bush declared them a member of the “Axis of Evil”; we invaded and currently occupy Iraq, one of the two other supposed Evildoers. After deposing and enabling the execution of Iraq’s president. Last week Bush’s UN ambassador John Bolton published a legal argument for nuking North Korea without provocation.

Believe it or not, this is the soft side of U.S. foreign policy.

For decades South Korea has tried to deescalate its relationship with the North, not infrequently expressing its desire to end formal hostilities, which legally never ended after the Korean War, and move toward the long-term goal of a united Korea under a single government. And for decades the United States has stood in the way, awkwardly trying to look reasonable as it opposes peace. “We do not seek to accelerate reunification,” a State Department spokesman said recently.

To say the least.

“South-North talks are inextricably related to North Korea-United States relations,” South Korean President Kim Dae Jung said in 2001, after Bush canceled dialogue with the North. The South, dependent on more than 20,000 U.S. troops stationed along its northern border, was forced to suspend reunification talks too.

The Reagan Administration pressured its South Korean ally to break off reunification talks in 1985.

Nixon did the same thing in 1974. After Nixon’s resignation later that year, President Gerald Ford opposed a UN resolution to demilitarize the border by withdrawing U.S. troops.

Even Mr. Reasonable, Barack Obama, refused to listen to South Koreans who want peace (and to visit long-lost relatives in North Korea). Celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Korean War Armistice, Obama threatened to loose the dogs of war: “The United States of America will maintain the strongest military the world has ever known, bar none, always. That is what we do.” What Obama would not do was allow North and South Korea to sit down and work out their differences. Before talks, Obama said, North Korea would have to denuclearize. After which, of course, there would be no need for talks because, hey, regime change is fun!

Why, a sane person might ask at this point, would U.S. policymakers want to risk World War III over two countries that repeatedly say they want to make peace and get back together?

For my money a 2007 analysis by the geopolitical thinktank Stratfor comes closest to explaining what’s really going on inside the Beltway: “The basic global situation can be described simply. The United States has overwhelming power. It is using that power to try to prevent the emergence of any competing powers. It is therefore constantly engaged in interventions on a political, economic and military level. The rest of the world is seeking to limit and control the United States. No nation can do it alone, and therefore there is a constant attempt to create coalitions to contain the United States. So far, these coalitions have tended to fail, because potential members can be leveraged out of the coalition by American threats or incentives.”

The U.S. is the Great Global Disruptor. “As powers emerge, the United States follows a three-stage program. First, provide aid to weaker powers to contain and undermine emerging hegemons. Second, create more formal arrangements with these powers. Finally, if necessary, send relatively small numbers of U.S. troops to Eurasia to block major powers and destabilize regions.” For example, Iran is the emerging hegemon in the Middle East. The U.S. undermines Iran with trade sanctions, props up rivals like Saudi Arabia with aid, and deploys U.S. troops next door in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Similarly the U.S. keeps China off-balance by propping up Taiwan and setting up new U.S. bases in the region. We play India against Pakistan, Europe against Russia.

A united Korea would create a new power center, potentially a new economic rival, to the U.S. in the Pacific Rim. So the U.S. uses threats (“totally destroy”) against the North and incentivizes the South (free border security).

It would almost be funny if it wasn’t so sick. Here’s to the day the two Koreas see through us.

(Ted Rall’s (Twitter: @tedrall) brand-new book is “Meet the Deplorables: Infiltrating Trump America,” co-written with Harmon Leon. His next book will be “Francis: The People’s Pope,” the latest in his series of graphic novel-format biographies. Publication date is March 13, 2018. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

Guest Post: A Public Service Announcement from American Teacher

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Ted Rall
The following guest post is by a teacher at an American high school who has requested anonymity. As should be obvious, these opinions are not mine. In other words, I may agree with them. I may not. That’s not the point. I’m putting this here to add to the current discussion over school shootings.

On March 14, students across the country are planning a walkout from their high schools in memory of the seventeen students killed in Florida in February.

This idea is dumb and dangerous.  It is when students are pouring out of the building, say as at dismissal time, that we are at our most vulnerable.  (Nicholas Cruz opened fire when students emerged from classes after he pulled an alarm.)  No one is blocking the doors.  Security guards and administrators are in the parking lots.  Something that administrators and police have overlooked can easily be exploited.  The opportunity to inflict a lot of harm is tremendous.

Unfortunately, for the next couple weeks, instead of supervising a learning environment, school officials will be planning for this walk-out.  They can’t say it’s not happening to thousands of high school students.  They don’t have a choice.  The entire student body cannot be suspended.  Yet it is hard to impose order on a social protest because, by definition, social protests are chaotic and disorderly.  Schools will just have to be as prepared as possible, but stopping an incident often hinges on luck.  The potential for a crisis is huge.

On March 14, I am going to lock my door and stay in my room.  Our union has advised us that walking out can be regarded as a form of protest or strike for which we can either be disciplined or terminated.

All the trouble is going to be outside anyway.  Very few adults will be supervising thousands of kids.

The walkout is a distraction from the school day.  Some kids probably do want to commemorate those who lost their lives in Florida.  Most just want to get out of school.  By letting kids walk out, we are empowering those not ready to handle power.  Encouraging this walkout is madness.

The walkout also publicly denies the school its authority.  When students are already having a protest on March 24, the March 14 walkout becomes hard to justify.  It becomes an issue of power and challenging those who would deny students power.  A walkout is, by definition, a provocation.  Students will be saying a great deal indeed when they get up and walk out.  This walkout will only make matters worse for schools and the discipline problems that they face on a daily basis.

If parents want to make a political point about guns, then they should come to the school and stand with their child for seventeen minutes.  If they really wanted to make an impact, they would ask their child to do seventeen nice things that day.  They would ask their child to say hello to seventeen classmates that they did not know.  Standing outside for seventeen minutes just puts on a show.

Otherwise, parents might want to consider protesting the protest and keeping their kids safe at home.  Call the school administrator to voice your concerns.

Or better yet, tell your child, “You’re a kid.”

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Here’s How Democrats Could Win This Fall and the One After That and the One After That

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Ted Rall

Image result for workers strike

Democrats are optimistic about their prospects for this November’s Congressional midterm elections. But, as I argued in The Wall Street Journal last week, the party’s growing (and increasingly powerful) progressive base may well decide to sit on their hands, staying home on Election Day — just as a determinative number of Bernie Sanders’ supporters did in 2016.

Don’t be mad at them. Would you vote for a party that promised you nothing whatsoever?

To avoid again snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, Democratic leaders must energize their long-neglected base. They should take their cue from Newt Gingrich in 1994 by nationalizing the election with an unapologetically left-leaning platform promising substantial change if they take back the House and/or Senate. Item one seems obvious: they should promise to impeach Donald Trump.

But anti-Trumpism wasn’t enough to win in 2016 and it won’t be enough this year either, especially in races featuring incumbents defending gerrymandered districts. Democrats should set aside identity politics in favor of a class-based agenda that leverages the low unemployment rate in order to restore some of the power workers have lost to decades of downsizing, outsourcing and deunionization.

If not now, when? True, many employers are deploying monopsonic tactics like non-compete and no-poaching clauses to keep workers toiling at their firms without giving them a raise. Even so, there are so many new jobs that corporations are complaining about labor shortages. Working Americans are never going to have a better chance to pressure their bosses to treat them better.

What should the Democrats’ pro-worker platform for 2018 include?

Let’s start with a $25-an-hour federal minimum wage. Sounds radical, but it’s what the lowest-paid workers would earn if Congress had tied the rate either to increases in worker productivity since 1960 or to the official inflation rate (the real one is higher) since the end of the Vietnam War. Going forward, the minimum wage should be indexed to the (real) inflation rate. Bosses say they’d have to lay people off but studies show that’s a bluff. As a concession to employers, the minimum wage could be adjusted downward if there’s deflation.

The United States is one of the few countries on earth — perhaps the only country — with “at-will” employment. Under U.S. labor law, employers can fire workers for any reason that isn’t specifically illegal, such as discrimination by gender or race, or retaliating against a whistleblower. In Europe, there are no independent contractors. All employees get a contract. Unless it’s for good cause (like a worker caught stealing), bosses can’t lay you off without paying you months, or even years, of severance pay. American workers too deserve to be treated with dignity. Democrats should end the obscenity that is at-will.

Under a Clinton-era law, American workers get up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave for events like the birth of a baby. Talk about cheap! According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the U.S. is the only one of 41 countries that doesn’t offer at least two months of paid leave. Estonia gives more than a year and a half. Paid. Are Estonians better people, more deserving of time with their kids, than Americans? Germany offers more than 40 weeks — so who really won World War II?

Employers often fire workers because they want to join or organize a union. This is already illegal. But that law is toothless because employers simply make up some other reason to get rid of pro-union workers. Getting rid of at-will employment would solve the problem.

These fixes address issues that have long afflicted workers. Going forward, after this fall, Democrats should also take on the big systemic shifts in the workplace that are leaving even more working people underpaid and underprivileged despite putting in a hard week’s work.

Freelancers and independent contractors currently make up more than a third of American workers. They don’t get an employer-matched 401(k), much less a pension. They pay for their own healthcare. The 1099 set needs and deserves paid family leave, protection from fickle at-will employers and a nest egg for retirement.

Just shy of 20% of workers work part-time; many people hold multiple part-time jobs because they can’t find one full-time position. The system needs to take care of their health, retirement and worker-protection requirements as well.

No one is talking about the looming Generation X retirement — or lack of retirement — crisis. Nevertheless, it’s coming. Gen Xer retirement saving rates are terrifyingly low. An obvious solution is beefing up Social Security, but Republicans are slashing benefits instead.

Based on their record of inaction and subservience to corporate interests, I don’t expect Democrats to roll up their sleeves and take on the pocketbook issues progressives — and many swing voters — care about. But if I’m wrong, and they get serious about the stuff that matters most, they’ll win.

(Ted Rall’s (Twitter: @tedrall) brand-new book is “Meet the Deplorables: Infiltrating Trump America,” co-written with Harmon Leon. His next book will be “Francis: The People’s Pope,” the latest in his series of graphic novel-format biographies. Publication date is March 13, 2018. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

Today in the WSJ: My Essay about the Rise of the Populist Left

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Ted Rall

Today I have an article in the Wall Street Journal. Titled “Civil War in the Democratic Party,” it’s an argument that the most potent – and ignored – force in American politics today is the populist left that supported Bernie Sanders. You can read the article here if you have a subscription but it’s behind a pay wall. However if you find the article via a link in Twitter (Hint: I tweeted it) you can read the whole thing.

Publisher’s Weekly Issues the 1st Review of my new book “Francis: The People’s Pope”

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Ted Rall

The trade magazine Publisher’s Weekly has issued the first published review of my new graphic biography “Francis: The People’s Pope.” Publication date is March 13, 2018 and is now available for pre-order from your local bookseller, online or, for a personally autographed copy, from me directly.

Here’s their review:

The latest in Rall’s rapid-fire series of graphic biographies of polarizing figures (including Bernie, Snowden, Trump) takes a more considered approach to its subject and is all the better for it. The book starts and ends with sharp questioning about whether this Argentine Jesuit reformer can turn around a scandal-plagued Catholic Church. In between, Rall provides as much context as biography, with pocket histories of everything from Argentina’s “Dirty War” to Vatican II. These pieces are neatly woven together into the narrative of how Jorge Mario Bergoglio, a onetime conservative whose diplomatic relationship with the military junta was criticized as “murky,” transformed into the humble reformer Pope Francis, cleaning up corrupt ancient institutions like the Vatican Bank and dispensing liberal bon mots such as “Who am I to judge?” that drive church traditionalists mad. Featuring his familiar slapped-together mixture of bug-eyed figures and zinelike photo and text montages, Rall keeps things informal in style, if not content. While snarky about gushing media coverage (summed up as “awesome cool pope changes up church”), this swift-paced and thought-provoking book is ultimately hopeful about whether this pope has “Made the Church Great Again,” providing readers a jumping-off point to keep questioning.

Guest Post: A Teacher Speaks Out on School Shootings

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Ted Rall

The following is a guest blog post by an American high school teacher, a person I know, who wishes to remain anonymous. — Ted Rall

Nicholas Cruz got his gun legally.  So did Adam Lanza.  So did Steve Paddock.  So do most shooters.

Short of taking everyone’s guns, which is not going to happen and which will just drive the underground market for guns, what can society do about these disaffected kids who want to shoot up their schools?

The premise of the school where I teach is that we cannot prevent shootings; all we can do is minimize casualties.  Think about that for a moment and think about how far we are pulling back the line.  We are acknowledging that one day there will be a shooting, some kids will get shot and some will die.  There is no stopping it.

We train with that idea in mind.  We practice barricading the room and fighting back.  We discuss running away.  Gone are the lockdowns where we herd a class to the back of the room, turn off the lights and pretend we’re not there.

The FBI has told us that does not work.  All public schools in the United States have a security plan which is constantly being updated.  Administrators are in touch with the police.  FBI agents have probably met with your school’s officials.

Of course, in some public schools, kids routinely come into the building armed with guns and knives.  These kids know that people know who they are and that they’ll be caught.  They will finish their business out on the street.  These are the schools where we don’t want metal detectors.  We don’t want to disarm the people who can take an active shooter out.

I teach in one of these schools and have never felt unsafe.  Perhaps that’s foolishness.  Kids aren’t after me; they’re after each other.  Occasionally, someone gets unhinged.  One year, I had a kid whose computer kept getting unplugged by other students.  “I’m about to go full psycho!” he screamed.  Not a tad.  Not a smidge.  Full-on psycho.  The student was removed and later outplaced.

Teachers here carry distress buttons that are wired in to the police station so that a swat team can be dispatched immediately.  So far we have not used them.  My school has its problems, but it is in my hometown, where kids have too much money, parents don’t pay attention, and administrators brush problems under the rug that I would be afraid to teach.  Given what I know about public schools, I would not teach in an affluent one.  I’d find another way to make a living.

I don’t want to get shot. I’m not a hero and neither are my friends. As much as we admire men like Aaron Feis and Peter Wang, the two men who died saving others in Florida, I’m sorry parents, we are probably not those teachers.  We’re out.

And while the media rightly focuses attention on those two heroes, as well as myriad other issues related to the shooting, there is a big question that thus far has gone unexplored.

How did Nicholas Cruz get in that high school?

He had been expelled and was reported to the FBI.

A massive security breach occurred when Cruz walked into that building.  The school administration needs to do an investigation and be transparent about its findings.  If there was a breach in protocol, then someone needs to be fired, perhaps held criminally negligent.

Negligence is a massive liability so the school district will try to cover up any investigation if it heads in that direction. But someone needs to be accountable.

School districts need to be responsible for your child’s security.  So do you.  Pay attention to your kid and what he is up to just the way you pay attention to his academics and extracurricular activities.

Just as a responsible parent is involved in their child’s education, you will need to be involved in making sure your child’s school stays safe.

Have a look around the school building itself.  Walk around it.  Are there points of access where you can enter unobserved?  Are there doors propped open or unlocked?  Talk to your child.  They know these points as well as places to hide better than teachers.  They also know what kid might go “full-psycho” better than a teacher would.

Do you need photo I.D. to get in the building?  Are you escorted to and from your destination?  How many police officers does your school have?  Are there security guards at the entrances?  Does the school have cameras?  Do staff carry distress buttons?  Will administration let you sit in on the school safety committee and offer an opinion?  If not, why?

If, God forbid, there is a shooting, what happens?  Do you want your child running madly through the halls, trying to escape?  If you don’t want to arm the teachers, do you want them to have glass cutters to break the windows out and fold-up ladders for those not on a ground floor?

Are there things that you can do to improve your school’s security?  In a town adjacent to the one where I live, mothers take turns patrolling the perimeter of their child’s elementary school so that trouble does not enter the building.

These question matter not if someone wants to shoot up your child’s school, but when.

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