{"id":10797,"date":"2007-05-14T16:50:09","date_gmt":"2007-05-14T20:50:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/10797.html"},"modified":"2007-05-14T16:50:09","modified_gmt":"2007-05-14T20:50:09","slug":"tennessee-teachers-stage-fake-gunman-attack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/tennessee-teachers-stage-fake-gunman-attack\/","title":{"rendered":"Tennessee teachers stage fake gunman attack"},"content":{"rendered":"

Given news accounts of this incident<\/a> in Murfreesboro, Tenn., it sounds like an awful incident that terrorized some young kids. But part of me can’t help but wonder how much worse it could have been.<\/p>\n

Staff members of an elementary school staged a fictitious gun attack on students during a class trip, telling them it was not a drill as the children cried and hid under tables.<\/p>\n

The mock attack Thursday night was intended as a learning experience and lasted five minutes during the weeklong trip to a state park, said Scales Elementary School Assistant Principal Don Bartch, who led the trip.<\/p>\n

“We got together and discussed what we would have done in a real situation,” he said.<\/p>\n

But parents of the sixth-grade students were outraged. “The children were in that room in the dark, begging for their lives, because they thought there was someone with a gun after them,” said Brandy Cole, whose son went on the trip.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Obviously, this is awful. Those kids must have been terrified — school staffers convinced the students that a gunman was on the loose, they were told to hide and stay quiet in the dark, and a disguised teacher even pulled on a locked door. At least one 11-year-old girl told the AP she literally thought she was going to die. Forget Brokeback Mountain<\/a>, this<\/em> is “intentional infliction of emotional distress.”<\/p>\n

And while I wouldn’t for a moment make light of the situation, and I sincerely hope those responsible for this incident are disciplined, I think there’s an obvious snark here: would the right argue that those kids should have been armed?
\n
\nOK, 11-year-olds are probably a little young for firearms, even for the NRA crowd. But anytime there’s an incident in which a large group of people are being terrorized by a gunman, the reflexive answer from some corners seems to be, “If more people were armed, this wouldn’t happen.”<\/p>\n

And if students were armed, would the incident in Murfreesboro have happened? <\/p>\n

Just for the sake of discussion, let’s put these specific kids aside and say we’re dealing with high-school kids. School officials wanted to hold an emergency “drill,” so they orchestrate a fake attack, after telling the young people that it isn’t a drill. The students, some of whom are 18 in this hypothetical scenario, are told they’re in actual danger from an armed madman, and officials arrange for a horrifying scenario that makes the students believe it.<\/p>\n

I’m thinking back to the reaction several conservatives had<\/a> after the Virginia Tech tragedy, wondering about armed students and young people who “should have” attacked their attacker.<\/p>\n

You see where I’m going with this. I guess the moral of the story is, fake gunman attacks are bad. Fake gunman attacks around armed students could be worse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Given news accounts of this incident in Murfreesboro, Tenn., it sounds like an awful incident that terrorized some young kids. But part of me can’t help but wonder how much worse it could have been. Staff members of an elementary school staged a fictitious gun attack on students during a class trip, telling them it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10797","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10797","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10797"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10797\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10797"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10797"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}