Teacher Shares How She Prepares Classroom For Active Shooters In Viral Video Sparking Gun Control Debate
Maybe instead we should focus on gun control.
TikTok Have you ever been a child going to school in America? If so, you’d likely remember all of the drills we went through at school where we would turn off the lights and all go and hide in a corner of the classroom where no one can see us from the front door to the class.
If your classroom had two entrances, one of them was either locked or the window was covered or you just had to line up along the wall and hope you couldn’t be seen.
Well, things in the United States have progressed well past that point and have only gotten worse.
According to Statista and data from Everytown Research, the number of incidents where guns were fired on school grounds and people were either injured or killed has been increasing, almost exponentially.
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There have been several numbers of viral videos and stories about teachers finding new ways to protect their students aside from the normal drills.
One teacher decided to give all their kids hammers to fight back against active shooters, some have even been advocating for giving teachers weapons to be able to defend themselves against an active shooter situation.
A new viral TikTok shows how one teacher has decided to deal with the active shooter threat.
Carly Zacharias, @crzachar on TikTok, opened the TikTok by addressing fellow teachers.
“Hey teachers! So if you’re just like me you’ve probably been doing a lot of thinking recently about your school safety,” she says, referencing the state of gun control and the potential threat and fear of a school shooting happening at your school.
“I had these big windows along my back wall,” she says, giving a tour of her classroom. “My kids know that Plan A is always just to get out of that middle window and run across the street.”
“But of course Plan B is barricade the door and fight, you all know this,” she says.
She expands on the Plan B part of her active shooter defense strategy, complaining that the door to her classroom is a huge weak point since the door is wooden (it used to be metal) and has a giant window that looks in on it.
As such, she wondered what she could arm her kids with so they could defend against any potential intruders.
“What can I give every single student just something to prepare themselves? I thought: a hockey puck,” said Zacharias.
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“It can really hurt you, especially 30 [of them],” she explained, “you can keep them on the desk but my kids just fidgeted with them so then I got smart” and she just taped them under the desks.
“Obviously it’s just a deterrent, but it definitely makes us feel a little bit better,” she finished.
While it’s creative and very clearly not something that would be very viable against an active shooter, it’s definitely something that could work against an intruder of another kind and could serve as a way to help students feel safer.
People viewing the video, however, are horrified
“Do non-Americans watch this kind of thing with shock and horror?” said one of the comments on the TikTok, “America is a third world country with a gucci belt,” said another.
The viral TikTok has become a way for people to highlight the massive problem we have in the United States with gun violence and the near desensitization of the population judging by the nonchalant way Ms. Zacharias was able to talk about and post a video like this.
“Teachers spending their own money so that students have something to throw at shooters. Everything is fine,” said another comment.
The truth is, this is something that every teacher likely has to struggle with and think about considering how common mass shootings and school shootings have become.
Instead of looking for ways to arm students for self-defense, we should be looking for ways to prevent the need for those strategies at all.
A March For Our Lives, the organization founded after the Parkland shooting, commented on Zacharias’s video, saying “We have to fight for a reality where we don’t need those hockey pucks. Thank you for being so committed to protecting your students, sending love.”
Isaac Serna-Diez is a writer who focuses on entertainment and news, social justice, and politics. Follow him on Twitter here.