Responding to School Shootings: Six Proposals, and Some Anticipated Drawbacks

1. We will issue Kevlar-lined backpacks to all students. And Kevlar-lined pants and jackets. We will also consider Kevlar-lined notebooks, for hand-held protection, possibly designed to resemble the iconic shield carried by Captain America.

Anticipated drawbacks include: Dehydration; Chafing; Hypermuscular children due to constant resistance training; Potential copyright-infringement lawsuit from Marvel Entertainment, LLC.

2. We will outsource public education to commercial airlines. (Many public school districts are contending with aging infrastructure, and shootings almost never happen on airplanes—win-win!) This will create special opportunities for students studying aeronautics, cloud formations, and transportation hospitality.

Anticipated drawbacks include: A carbon footprint the size of the Amazon; Classes delayed without notice, then delayed again, then canceled; Classes relocated to the local Best Western until morning; Unequal adversities for students allergic to peanuts; Charter schools following suit by using charter airlines, further depleting the tax base.

3. We will seal all of the doors and windows and fill every classroom with a viscous, transparent gel, while also outfitting faculty and students with radio-equipped copper dive helmets connected to air-supply hoses. Bullets fired in this environment will be stopped by the gel, or at least slowed to nonlethal velocities. Dive helmets will provide supplemental protection.

Anticipated drawbacks include: (none foreseen)

4. We will surgically stitch together the four fingers on each hand of all male students, with only the thumbs remaining free, rendering their hands into mitten-like flippers incapable of operating anything with a trigger.

Anticipated drawbacks include: Further deterioration of male penmanship; Unfair female domination at Marbles, Cat’s Cradle, and Rock-Paper-Scissors; Other, more personal hardships specific to the manual prehensility of  pubescent boys—although they should not prove wholly insurmountable.

5. We will rename our children after their importance to us, so that media reports of their loss will better resonate with those who never met them and cannot otherwise understand:

“Our Life’s Meaning was listed among the dead.”

“So Much that We Cherish was killed trying to escape.”

“The Light of the World died en route to the hospital.”

“All That We Know to Be True remains unresponsive to stimuli.”

“Everything We Had Ever Hoped For is still waiting to be identified.”

Anticipated drawbacks include: Disapproval from in-laws; Inevitable nicknames; Extreme difficulty finding novelty personalized license plates at Disneyland, Six Flags, SeaWorld, etc.

6. Instead of demolishing every old school with decrepit structures and declining enrollment, we will preserve at least one disused campus in every town or locality, then populate the classrooms with adult volunteers recruited from among the aged or elderly, and those with fatal ailments or other dire medical prognoses, and anyone else among us who would rather die violently than see another child shamefully slaughtered in their school.

We will leave the doors unlocked; we will be the softest targets. We will call out to our destroyers, to anyone compelled to blitz into innocence to kill and cause carnage; we will advertise on the dark web: Are you a gathering storm with an empty heart? The bearer of a message with no meaning? We are waiting for YOU, right now, at 3200 West Elm Avenue. We will stand outside, welcoming killers and volunteers alike: Come inside! We’re not cowering in terror—we’re playing Heads-Up, Seven Up!

We will sit at old desks and study our grammar. We will pledge allegiance and chant mathematics. We will craft snowflakes with safety scissors, braid old thread into friendship. At Halloween we will hang up strings of laughing paper ghosts. We will whisper and pass notes or simply sit on the linoleum floor in warm pools of afternoon sunlight, waiting to become useful.

We will tell the School Board, the PTA: Don’t bother to remove the asbestos. No need to fix the leaking roof. Continue to ignore the black mold blooming across the acoustic tiles. Such threats mean nothing to us.

Anticipated drawbacks include: Rejection of our sacrifice by family and friends; Their claims that this won’t solve anything; Allegations of insanity and/or suicide. And yet, they will have to understand: We occupy these rooms not to make the world greater, but because nothing else we’ve tried has made our suffering any less.