“My teachers shot.” That’s what a 10th grader texted her mom on Wednesday, Sept. 4, from a locked-down school room at Apalachee High School in Winder, Ga. There was “blood everywhere,” she later recounted. And another teacher “put pressure on his wound with rags. Then she went to get police, and a kid from my class and I put the pressure on the wound. My teacher was lying there saying, ‘Good job.’”
Bill Leonard
A 14-year-old male student at the school has been charged with killing two teachers and two students, wounding nine others. The boy’s father, who gave him the AR-platform-style assault rifle as a “Christmas gift,” has been charged with involuntary manslaughter, second degree murder and cruelty to children. The “gift” came last year, even after the child had been questioned by the FBI for posting shooting threats online.
It’s fall 2024. School has started in the land of the free and the home of the armed to the teeth. Once again, students are reminded that on their way to algebra or history classes they may be called upon to “put pressure on the wound,” if and when a shooter shows up. Parents across the country are forced to live with the reality that on any school day they could receive a son or daughter’s text: “My teachers shot.” The words are a primal scream from any America school on any weekday. If your kids haven’t texted you like that it’s not because they’re safe, it’s because they’re lucky.
“If your kids haven’t texted you like that it’s not because they’re safe, it’s because they’re lucky.”
We’re playing classroom roulette with yet another generation of American children. Responding to the Georgia shooting, former FBI agent, now commentator, Frank Figliuzzi declared: “Our presidential candidates speak behind bullet-resistant glass, and we send our kids off to die with a lunchbox in their hands. We somehow rationalize, twisting ourselves into a societal pretzel to avoid the reality that we’re killing ourselves, with weapons.”
A ‘fact of life’
Speaking of rationalization, the current Republican vice presidential candidate commented: “I don’t like to admit this. I don’t like that this is a fact of life, but if you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you realize that our schools are soft targets, and we have got to bolster security at our schools.”
Why are school shootings an inevitable “fact of life” in the United States? Latest data available from CNN: 19 countries have experienced school shootings (total incidents from January 2009 to May 2018). Here’s the tally: United States, 288; Mexico, 8 South Africa, 6; Nigeria and Pakistan, 4; Afghanistan, 3; Brazil, Canada, France, 2; Azerbaijan, China, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Kenya, Russia and Turkey, 1.
One commentator notes that those stats indicate that schools are among the most “dangerous workplaces in the U.S.”
If such heinous events have become an American “fact of life,” why is enhanced security the only viable response? Can’t additional legal actions, long neglected or undermined in many states, also be applied? Why not start by banning assault weapons?
“Why is enhanced security the only viable response?”
The Winder school had security officers who moved quickly to confront and arrest the student, but not before four people were dead and nine others wounded. Are those 13 teachers and students collateral damage for this “fact of life” in a state lacking home gun lock or “red flag” laws? Their rapid response was in contrast to the 77-minute delay by officers at the Uvalde, Texas, school where 19 students and two teachers were slaughtered on May 24, 2022. The teen assailant at that school also used an AR-style firearm.
Grieving parents in Uvalde begged state legislators to make such firearms illegal in Texas. They refused. No doubt Georgia legislators will do the same should Winder parents demand such legislative action. Firearms remain the chief cause of childhood deaths in the U.S.
Some politicians don’t help. Mike Collins (R-Ga.), whose legislative district includes Winder, ran for office in 2022 with a video showing him using an AR-15 style weapon to obliterate a trash can labeled “voting machine” as a promise to prove that Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in Georgia was stolen. Collins was elected, a living “witness” to the power of assault weapons.
Assault weapons ban
A 10-year ban on assault weapons was signed into law by President Bill Clinton on Sept. 13, 1999, and lasted until that date in 2009, not to be renewed. This is the weapon of choice in multiple school shootings, perhaps because they kill so quickly and horrendously. Yet wouldn’t an assault weapons ban, just that, at least honor the memory of the dead, even if it stopped only a modicum of the school, concert, church house, parade, movie theater, grocery store, shopping mall, synagogue deaths?
“How can constitutional ‘originalism’ equate Colonial muskets with postmodern AR-15s?”
There are about 393 million privately owned firearms in the U.S., according to an estimate by the Switzerland-based Small Arms Survey. That gives the U.S. the highest rate of gun ownership in the world. Where the Second Amendment is concerned, how can constitutional “originalism” equate Colonial muskets with postmodern AR-15s? Why are we electing legislators or appointing judges who can’t see and know the difference?
If we are going to retain the “legal” use of such weapons for illegal purposes, the least we can do is reform our language. Let’s consider dropping the term “pro-life” from our national vocabulary. To establish elaborate laws to protect the unborn but refuse to implement effective laws that safeguard the lives of the “born” is the height of national hypocrisy.
Moses and the Commandments
When slain students, teachers and inadequate firearm laws highlight our national obsession with the Second Amendment, at least evangelicals and the rest of us would-be followers of Jesus might return to the book of Exodus, chapter 32. In this sobering account of idolatry, Moses comes down from the mountain having received God’s law (a portion soon to be posted in certain state school classrooms) to discover that his colleague Aaron had helped the Israelites create a golden calf, a soulless deity that receives their obsessive obeisance. The text says:
Moses said to Aaron, “What did this people do to you that you have brought so great a sin upon them?” And Aaron said, “Do not let the anger of my lord burn hot; you know the people, that they are wicked. They said to me, ‘Make gods for us, who shall go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.’ So I said to them, ‘Whoever has gold, take it off’; so they gave it to me, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf!”
Aaron’s pathetic excuse parallels similar responses of contemporary lawmakers who refuse to confront firearm legislation while surrendering to the “fact of life” argument after yet another devastating firearm massacre. It is idolatry of the trigger finger.
Moses’ response is powerfully dramatic: “As soon as he came near the camp and saw the calf and the dancing, Moses’ anger burned hot, and he threw the tablets from his hands and broke them at the foot of the mountain. He took the calf that they had made, burned it with fire, ground it to powder, scattered it on the water, and made the Israelites drink it.”
Has the Constitution’s Second Amendment become the golden calf for our generation, set on a trajectory for generations to come? Like Aaron’s excuses to Moses, certain lawmakers (and judges) cry: “We threw a musket in the fire and out came this AR-15!”
But what if assault weapons could again be banned? Then might we melt down a couple of the wretched guns for folks obsessed with them to drink? If so, let’s not mix the stuff with water, but with whiskey. It ought to burn a little on the way down.
Then perhaps, someday we could even drop the words “my teachers shot” from our children’s vocabulary. And thank God.
Bill Leonard is founding dean and the James and Marilyn Dunn professor of Baptist studies and church history emeritus at Wake Forest University School of Divinity in Winston-Salem, N.C. He is the author or editor of 25 books. A native Texan, he lives in Winston-Salem with his wife, Candyce, and their daughter, Stephanie.
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