It’s probably a coincidence that my company—located
in Downtown D.C.—scheduled what they called training sessions in emergency
preparedness (in reality, just presentations by various representatives of
local agencies) yesterday. Yesterday being the day of walkouts by elementary to
high school students across the country highlighting the most recent round of
mass shootings at schools and demanding that our leaders take action on gun
control.
I mean, I’m sure the awareness sessions were
planned some time ago, but in addition to the usual disasters—hurricanes,
earthquakes, cyber attacks, bombings, floods—we had something new: what to do
in the event of an active shooter in the building.
Turns out you’ve got three options: run, hide
or fight, as demonstrated in this video we saw:
(My office door doesn’t have a lock on it, but
I could jam my visitor’s chair against the handle. I also have a bottle of Virginia
cabernet someone gave me, which would probably be my weapon should the shooter
decide to try to enter. That’s assuming that I can’t get to the stairs and run
down the nine flights to the ground, which would of course be my first choice
of strategies. People in those open-plan offices so favored by the tech industry are stuffed.)
I suppose if our schoolkids have to undergo
active shooter survival drills, we should, too. But it pisses me off that the
NRA and its bought-and-paid-for GOPig stooges at every level of government are
making us go through this instead of actually solving the problem of easy
access to guns.
And I’m glad that the kids are showing more
backbone than our elected officials.
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