Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?

 

Today’s shooting at an elementary school in Connecticut was a tragedy.  But it was a tragedy that could have been either entirely avoided or at least mitigated substantially.  How?  Well, it’s time to stop thinking of this as a political issue and to start thinking about this as a tactical, safety issue and apply some very straightforward logic.  To do this, we’re going to ask a 5th grader.  After all, who better to ask than a person representative of the victims targeted?

After he’d seen the news all over the TV, I simply asked my 5th grader how this tragedy could have been averted.  What could have been done differently?  First, I presented him with a piece of paper and we drew a bad guy and a potential victim.  I labeled the location as a hardware store.

Then I told him to draw whatever he could think of that would have stopped the bad guy.  He drew this without a second’s hesitation:

 Hmm.  He gave the store clerk a gun.  That, he said, leveled the playing field.  He said that the clerk would have had just as much chance of stopping the bad guy as the bad guy had of injuring or killing the store clerk.  Fair enough.  That fulfilled my request.

So, then I gave him this picture.  I merely changed the location.  I told him everything was the same, except now we’re at a school and instead of a store clerk, we had a principal sitting in his office.

 He thought for a second and started to draw a gun in the principal’s hand.  I had to stop him.  I then explained that Connecticut had laws about guns that stated the following were gun-free zones (meaning no one could have a firearm at these locations):

• Schools
• Courts
• Churches

In typical 5th grader fashion, he argued, ‘But the bad guy just broke the law!’

I said, ‘I see that. But did it stop him?  He’s still there in the picture, right?’

‘Yes,’ he conceded.  ’Now what?’

I said, ‘That’s up to you.’  What can be done?’

‘Well, the principal can call the police; I’ll draw a phone….,’ he said.

‘Good idea!  How long will it take the police to get there compared to how fast that bad guy can shoot?’  I responded.

‘Arrgh! Okay….he can duck behind the desk….no….that won’t work; bullets could go through that and the bad guy could run around really fast.  A knife?  Not so good against a gun.  Arggh.’  Then silence.  ’I don’t know. I can’t think of anything else that will work!  A gun is tough to beat.  Everything I’m thinking ends up like this.’  And he drew the following:

‘And that’s what happened today at the school in Connecticut,’ I said.  So, then I asked him who those gun laws prohibiting firearms in schools, churches and courts protected.

‘Duh, mom….the BAD GUYS! They don’t care about laws. They weren’t going to follow them anyway.’

Are you smarter than a 5th grader?

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