To the Editor,
Thursday morning I picked up my second-grade son from our local public school in Westchester. His teacher reported to me that he had a tough time managing his behavior during an unplanned lockdown drill that took place while the class was outside of their regular classroom. On previous days if there was a report of goofing off, I would offer an immediate reprimand or statement of disappointment to my son, but on this day I was at a loss for anything say. I couldn’t even offer to the teacher a reflexive parental “I’m sorry” that we’ve given to strangers in the restaurant, grandparents in their houses, and so on. Because I wasn’t sorry for my son. If anyone was at fault, it is me.
As a parent, I have watched the parents of Sandy Hook take on Washington and have done nothing to help them. As a neighbor, I have watched a gun shop open up in Harrison, a stone’s throw from my house, and kept silent. As a resident of Westchester County, I witnessed our own County Executive Rob
Astorino overturn a majority vote by his own legislators to allow gun shows back on county property, where there had been none for years, without picking up the phone or lifting my pen. My complacency makes me complicit.
I remember as an elementary-aged student in the early 1980s, we would have bomb drills in our public school in Massapequa, New York. Our teachers would file us into the hallways where we were instructed to ball up with our hands over our heads so we would be out of the way of flying glass. But one day, those drills stopped. And whoever that enemy was faded away. Today in elementary schools all across the county, children practice lockdown drills where they tape paper over the classroom door and hide in a closet in case the bad guys come for them. Sadly, those bad guys aren’t from an ocean far away—they are folks around us who shouldn’t have gotten guns in the first place, and the well-pocketed suits who bully their way around government preventing any common sense regulations from happening.
Our children should not have to prepare for shooting incidents in their schools. It is my hope that someday we can extinguish the root of these drills altogether, and not live in fear of the bad men with guns who might be coming. We must stay vigilant on the most local of levels to stop the gun culture from creeping back in.
Laura Rosenthal,
Larchmont
