Surviving a school shooter lockdown

Letter from the home of gun violence; Commentary from a lockdown survivor Charles Heimler (charlesheimler@yahoo.com) I was a first hand witness to a school lockdown.  Faced with third hand reports of a black man on campus with a gun, our school was put into active shooter response mode.  And the word came from the college administration to lockdown the area in which I work.   This happened one week ago today, and I'm still reeling from the experience.  The experience left me highly concerned about my job--this is not what I expected to be encountering 30 years ago when I began teaching in a community college.  Now, I have thought about the idea of always having now to be prepared for a shooter in school;  now, it's the holiday and it is not until January that I have to return to my office and classroom on the campus. We haven't had time in the end of the semester rush to even debrief our experiences; the only word from the college leaders was an email the next day about the episode that ended "all's well that ends well".   I reflect upon the experience, and my part in it, I can't hardly say that all is well.  Like many of us, I've become a student of gun violence on campus in the last few weeks.  And the national experience following the recent horrendous events have been brought directly to me as a participant and eyewitness. Teachers are now told that they must respond the the shooter before the first responders arrive.  The little training we've received makes an important point salient--you and your students are on your own when the gunman arrives; don't expect the SWAT team to save you.   I've been reading the accounts of the specific episode at our college.  Student journalists posted to facebook during the lockdown.  The media trucks appeared on the campus in the middle of the incident which occured during their prime evening newscasts.  News outlets across the country, the UK, and the Phillipines reported on the event.  Five pages of links are available on the internet. Meanwhile, the commentary about shooters in schools continues on airwaves and print periodicals.  Even though the experience at our school was triggered only by the alleged sighting of a black man in a white tee shirt with a gun, it was treated by the campus authorities as a live shooter incident, and they responded according to a shooter on campus training that prepped them for such a mindset last September. The person who make the report has yet to be located.  That that response was prompted by a third hand report indicates the power of a false rumor, perhaps festered by the authorities themselves, who during the same week as the shooter incident issued all campus warnings about a black man with a knife on campus, a smell from the boiler that called out the fire department, and the malfunction of the lights in the student parking lot.  Many commentators have expressed their punditry about the gun violence that has overwhelmed America in this holiday season.  Yet have they the perspective that I and others have from surviving as an eyewitness to a campus shooter lockdown? Now, teachers are "pre-responders", tasked with organizing the students and the shooter before the civil authorities are able to arrive. Now  I see campus shooters through the lens of my own eyes, and having barricaded a score of students behind closed doors and awaited the arrival of a gunman and his hail of bullets to arrive into the former sanctity of the school, I now wonder about the "next time", and am told by all that this is the new normal for American teachers.  Not what I'd expected three decades ago when entering the teaching profession.