XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, alt.politics.republicans, talk.politics.guns   
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   From: chicken_tacos@democrats.rus   
      
   In article    
   governor.swill@gmail.com wrote:   
   >   
   > Kamala screws everything with a dick.  Skanks do that.   
      
   Sarah Lerner is painfully familiar with how teachers in Uvalde,   
   Texas must have felt as a gunman attacked their elementary   
   school and fatally shot 21 people on May 24. In 2018, Lerner   
   kept 15 students safe in her classroom at Marjory Stoneman   
   Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., while a teenager armed   
   with an AR-15-style rifle shot and killed 17 people on the   
   campus.   
      
   “We get into education because we love children, we love our   
   subject matter, and we love teaching. None of us go into   
   education to be human shields, and to be bodyguards, and   
   makeshift police officers,” says Lerner, who still teaches   
   English at Marjory Stoneman Douglas. “But when those kids are in   
   your charge, no matter how old they are, even my 18-year-old   
   seniors, you are responsible for them.”   
      
   As efforts to pass comprehensive gun-safety legislation continue   
   to stall, many educators who survived mass shootings feel like   
   they’ve been left to deal with the problem on their own—forced   
   to protect their students from the recurring threat of gun   
   violence in schools.   
      
   When she heard the first reports out of Uvalde last week, Abbey   
   Clements, hoped that maybe the gunman had only barricaded   
   himself inside the school and that there might not be any   
   casualties. When she learned about the death toll, she fell to   
   the floor and grabbed a colleague’s hand.   
      
   “I just lost it,” says Clements, who on Dec. 14, 2012 huddled   
   with 17 second-grade students in her classroom when gunshots   
   rang out at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. She   
   recalls how she read a picture book about polar bears and tried   
   to sing holiday songs to keep her students calm. “How do we   
   continue to function when kids are killed in an elementary   
   school?”   
      
   She thought about the two teachers and 19 students who were   
   killed last week. “Your mind goes right to that time and you   
   think about those teachers and those poor students,” she says.   
   “I’m so sorry for them that we did not fix this.”   
      
   In the wake of the shooting at Sandy Hook, Clements says she   
   relied on teachers who had survived the 1999 shooting at   
   Columbine High School, who could relate to the trauma she had   
   experienced and could offer perspectives on whether to move to a   
   new school or whether to keep teaching at all. She plans to   
   reach out to Uvalde teachers to offer similar support. But the   
   fact that that’s necessary has become tragic proof of the   
   country’s inability—or unwillingness—to solve this problem.   
      
   “I mostly feel shame. I also feel outrage,” says Clements, who   
   now teaches fourth grade at another public school in Newtown,   
   Conn. “How pathetic is this that we let this go on this long,   
   tragedy after tragedy?”   
      
   In December, Clements and Lerner and New York teacher Sari Beth   
   Rosenberg launched Teachers Unify to End Gun Violence, an   
   initiative aimed at amplifying the stories of educators who   
   survived school shootings and advocating for solutions to stop   
   the epidemic of gun violence across the country.   
      
   “In the almost four and a half years since it happened at my   
   school, how many other shootings have happened, both in school   
   and elsewhere?” says Lerner, who has been teaching for 20 years.   
   “It’s so, so tragically sad that this happened, but that it   
   keeps happening.”   
   ‘This is my cause’   
      
   Lerner says the Parkland shooting changed every aspect of her   
   life. Four years later, she remains acutely aware of exits in   
   any room she enters. She doesn’t sit with her back to the door.   
   She was teaching 1984 to her students when the shooting began,   
   and has not taught the book since: “I don’t know if and when   
   I’ll be ready to do it again.” She still hates the sound of   
   fireworks.   
      
   Lerner now teaches students who weren’t on campus the day of the   
   shooting; many were on lockdown in a nearby middle school. And   
   she is clear with them, on the first day of school, how   
      
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