Sidebar
Dr.
Moseley is bringing up Greg on two counts of third degree plagiarism after Greg
was overly influenced by Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart
CHARGERS LOST LAST NIGHT...
Lost
chargers include a laptop charger and one for an iPhone. If found please turn
in to Ms K.
As
always, Mr. Davis aced the lyrics quiz from yesterday. Part two of the quiz is
to guess which DU editor put in a Flaming Lips song...
Todays
Lyrics Quizzes:
He's
the one
Who
likes all our pretty songs
And
he likes to sing along
And
he likes to shoot his gun
But
he knows not what it means
Atheist
Jesus piece
Hangin'
on a cross
We
sit and discuss God on lawn chairs
I
asked you to go to the Green Day concert
Said
you never heard of them
How
cool is that
Articles
Boston Strong? Antoinette Tough
By: Alex Kristic (DU Dancer)
Several weeks ago, a young man armed with an
AK-47-style assault rifle and 500 rounds of ammunition entered an elementary
school just outside of Atlanta, Georgia. He confessed to the woman working at
the front desk that he was "not mentally stable," was "not on
his medication," and had "nothing to live for." Inside the
school were 870 children ages five to eleven. It seemed America was facing
another tragic school shooting. Despite the odds, however, the woman working at
the front office, named Antoinette Tuff, managed to get the man to put down his
weapons and surrender to the police within half an hour.
Many Americans have already
heard this story, but what is less widely known of this incident is the fact
that the school (and Tuff in particular) was prepared to deal with such a
situation.
The school district spokesman,
Quinn Hudson, has stated that the school staff had regular training for situations involving
"trespassers and emergency protocol." In particular, Tuff and two
other women (a cafeteria manager and a media specialist, stationed in different
corners of the school) were trained specifically in dealing with "hostile
situations." Each woman was trained to operate the school's emergency
system, which entailed signaling a code to each of the other women, who would
then trigger a phone tree to alert the rest of the school to lock down.
In addition, all three women
regularly underwent realistic, high-stress drills in which they were faced with
an "intruder" and were expected to carry out these
procedures. "The training is so often and extensive, they thought
[the real incident] was a drill" at first, said Hudson. Gregory Thomas,
the former director of security of New York City schools is also familiar
with these kinds of drills and maintains that high-stress training is key:
"It's always important to do these kinds of drills under stress. We're
trying to move schools to the point of stressing people while they're doing the
drills, so they won't just be doing them matter-of-factly."
These reports raise questions of
the morality of these drills. Is regularly scaring a school official to the
point that she thinks the hundreds of children she is responsible for are in
mortal danger a morally acceptable practice? Maybe not. However, is it worth it
if it prevents a possible tragedy?
Several noteworthy professionals
think this kind of training is becoming increasingly crucial to school safety
in our day and age. Gregory Thomas, for example, asserts that this kind of
training should be classed with other regular school emergency protocols, like
fire and earthquake drills. Clint van Zandt, former FBI profiler and
hostage negotiator, also suggests that further training in negotiation tactics
could be beneficial: "She did all the things we try to teach
negotiators. She was a great go-between."
The recent success of this
approach to school safety at Tuff's school may discredit the insistence of
Wayne LaPierre, head of the National Rifle Association, that "the only
thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun." This kind
of success very well may be the exception, not the rule (as this is the first
success of its kind, so it is too soon to tell); nonetheless, this triumph may
be indicative of a wholly different route we can take towards securing our
schools.
Sources: MSNBC, CNN, The Guardian
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