Here's what's going on in the Texas legislature in response to school shootings: All students in third grade and up to be trained in battlefield trauma care. https://legiscan.com/TX/text/HB1147/2023
"If you’re a person living on planet Earth, you already know that no massacre in America is tragic enough to get Republicans to do something about the country’s endless epidemic of gun violence. School shootings that claim the lives of nine-year-olds? Doesn’t cut it. Ten people murdered while grocery shopping? Nope. A family of five gunned down by a neighbor because they told him his AR-15 was keeping their baby awake? Texas governor Greg Abbott was apparently more concerned about the victims’ immigration status.
Republicans in the Lone Star State are, not surprisingly, some of the worst offenders when it comes to refusing to addressing the problem, having rejected dozens of attempts at gun control, while allowing people to carry guns without background checks, licenses, or training.
In 2019, this led to state Representative Barbara Gervin-Hawkins, a Democrat, to believe she had no other choice than to author a bill (which went into effect in 2020) requiring school districts to 'maintain and make available to school employees and volunteers bleeding control stations…for use in the event of a traumatic injury involving blood loss,' and to provide optional training to students in seventh grade and above.
The law also stipulates that the 'bleeding control station' must include 'tourniquets approved for use in battlefield trauma care by the armed forces of the United States.'
Speaking about the law last year, Gervin-Hawkins, a gun control proponent, said in a Facebook post that it 'creates a traumatic injury response protocol to active school shootings in Texas,' and that 'students, school administration, faculty, and staff should never be in fear of losing their lives while in school.' ”
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If you don't understand, after reading this remarkable story, that we're now living in a country where a huge part of its population has lost all its marbles, then it's a good bet you're part of that population as well.
Instead of working to hammer out some sort of compromise to make schools safer for children in kindergarten, grammar, and high school, the pols have come up with a way to stop children from "bleeding out."
Because it is obvious that they KNOW! They ABSOLUTELY KNOW! that more massacres will happen, and more children and teens will be slaughtered in their schools, and this is all they'll do to prevent that unimaginable horror from happening again, and again, and again.
We know that AR-15s and the like were banned before, and it was legal. When George W. Bush was a presidential candidate, he promised to keep the ban on those weapons of war, but he lied, and the ban lapsed under his administration.
As a nation, we have failed our children when all we'll do to protect their lives in our public schools is establish bleeding control stations so that when another school shooting happens some of the slaughtered children can be saved if someone can get to the bleeding control station and put the tourniquet on the child so that he/she doesn't bleed to death -- y'know, like the babies did at Sandy Hook, Columbine, Uvalde, and Parkman, just to name a few.
As a mother and grandmother, I am ashamed to be living in a country where I witness its willful refusal to solve a solvable problem, and where the politicians and other leaders have no problem seeing babies, children, and teens in school have to routinely be part of shooter drills and now in Texas, see "bleeding control stations" hanging on the wall for the inevitable next school massacre.
In related news re: "What Texas is doing or not doing about school shootings, Republican Ken King has proposed a bill that would pay public school teachers and staff up to $25,000 to carry guns at school. Which, as you might have guessed, is a horrible idea."
I don't recognize America anymore.
6 comments:
I have a solution that might work, aside from the banning of assault weapons (preferable), but it's expensive.
From pre-school each child receives age appropriate instruction on how to handle a weapon, what to do when one is found, and mental health classes to teach the child appropriate emotional responses for when hormones kick in. As I said, expensive.
It will never see the light of day because at the end of the day accountability isn't a super power of those who fight tooth and nail against any sort of regulation on their personal choices. It is as if We The People are held hostage by a group of juveniles who've never learned the life lesson that responsibility and accountability are the reverse side of the Freedom of Choice coin.
When a nation (ours) accepts the death of children in schools as normal and begins to treat those deaths as nothing more than collateral damage for the "god given right to own weaons" it tells you two things, 1) the right to life conservatives and republicans in Texas are hypoctrites on the issue of choice (abortion), and 2) the country has completely lost its moral compass and claim to decency.
We are a sick nation of delude fools.
GOTS's comment reminded me -- I used to work for the largest early childhood education association. We had annual conferences that would routinely bring in between 10-20,000 people. Like every other conference, we had exhibit halls for companies to promote whatever they were selling. One year the NRA contracted out a booth to promote their "Eddie Eagle" gun safety program for kids. Boy howdy, you should have seen the blowback from that! I just now googled Eddie Eagle and found this report from The Trace:
"Children who received instruction in gun safety were no more likely than those who did not to heed basic rules about what to do if they came across a gun — like leaving the room or notifying an adult — a federal review of four research papers found.
The assessment was included in a report from the Government Accountability Office on the state of research into preventing children’s access to guns. The GAO examined four studies published between 1996 and 2009 in academic journals of pediatrics and child development. The papers examined experimental lessons as well as the most prominent child-focused gun-safety program, the National Rifle Association’s Eddie Eagle curriculum, which the group says has reached 13 million children since 1988.
Each of the four studies reached the same conclusion, according to the GAO’s analysis: that “behavior skills training” — typically, brief informational sessions or video presentations explaining what kids should do if they encounter a gun — “did not instill consistent safe firearm habits in young children.”
In one 2004 study reviewed by the GAO, an experiment found that the NRA’s Eddie Eagle program did succeed at getting children between the ages of 4 and 6 to verbally repeat rules on what to do when they encounter a gun, like leaving the room immediately and telling an adult. But notably, those same children were not significantly more likely than others who hadn’t gone through Eddie Eagle to actually adopt those behaviors when they encountered a gun in a realistic setting.
Only after multiple rounds of intensive hands-on training did children exhibit higher levels of safe behavior around guns. One study of 6- and 7-year-olds found that it took three rounds of training with simulated role play and evaluation for the children to demonstrate that they would leave a gun alone. Even then, 12 percent of the children failed to keep away from the weapons or tell an adult.
The NRA has presented Eddie Eagle, a video-based curriculum with follow-up activities that include coloring pages and writing a letter to parents about gun safety, as an alternative to laws mandating safe storage. The program entails a single session with a cartoon, a discussion, and written assignments. Children who go through Eddie Eagle don’t do role-playing exercises or see an adult modeling of appropriate behavior.
Lisa Monroe, a University of Oklahoma education professor who was contracted by the NRA to develop an Eddie Eagle curriculum, told our reporter Mike Spies last year that the program is supposed to be “a discussion starter,” and that “in no way should it ever be touted as a replacement for laws, or something that could single-handedly stop a shooting. That’s really misusing the program.”
Grey One talks sass, Les
I've heard the argument from gun owners that goes: "Why should I have to give up my 2nd Amendment right to own an AR-15 or ANY FIREARM, just because a few people abuse their right to bear arms?"
I'd say this to that: "Do you have to remove your shoes at the airport before getting on the plane? Only one guy tried to blow up a plane with explosives in his shoe, and now look at what all of us have to do.
Also, what happened to doing something for the greater good? Will you lives be the poorer because you can't have an AR-15? Oh, you say that will open the door for banning more firearms? Well can't legislation be written to prevent that? And when we did ban the AR-15 type firearms, how did that impede on your freedoms?
We are a nation of selfish people who no longer care for our neighbors and our neighbors' children's well-being.
Now all texts are in italics!
We are a nation of self absorbed, unaware, imbeciles. Not al of us of course. But just enough to keep those that aren't forced to put up with their fear, delusions, and abject selfishness.
Se are a sick nation.
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