Ghastly

When I was in school, the only regular "drills" we had were fire drills, which happened a couple of times a year. (These revved up after a Catholic school in Chicago burned down in 1958. On my birthday, of all things. And the school had the same name as mine: Our Lady of the Angels. Nearly 100 kids were killed.) For fire drills, the alarm rang, we all marched out in orderly ranks, and stood in formation in the schoolyard until the all clear bell sounded.

Oddly, although I was a school kid from the mid-1950's through the mid-1960's - the height of the Red Scare - I have very little memory of the famous duck-and-cover drills that had kids poking their heads under their desks. 

I do remember one time when we marched down the hill to the church, which had a fallout shelter in the basement. 

And, certainly, the nuns were perpetually harping on the threat of Communists attacking the US and going after Catholics. They warned us that we might well be put in a position to become a martyr. If a Communist asked you whether you were a Catholic, sure, you could deny it and live. But if you said "Yes," well, a bullet between the eyes, and you punched your ticket to paradise. (I can't imagine that there would have been too many parents who'd want their children to answer "Yes." My father would have thought this was nuts and even my super religo mother would have been appalled. The nuns might not have concurred, but our parents would have come down on the side of Better Red than Dead.)

But, realistically, as scary as idea of a Catholic-hating Commie was, we knew that there had never been an American Catholic child martyr. 

The prospect of a school fire was more realistic, but even then, OLA Chicago was a one-off. And we were in a modern, one story school - the antithesis of rickety old multi-story OLA Chicago. We could all jump out the windows if worse came to worst. 

Today's kids know that school massacres are very real. That they happen. That they're relatively common.

Shady Hook. Uvalde. Parkland.

These kids know. They know they could be targets. They have to live with it. 

And, sadly, the response hasn't been to do something about keeping weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of those under the age of 21 and/or with mental health issues and/or who've made threats on social media. The response has been to harden the schools.

Cops in the halls. Arm the teachers. Anti-ballistic backpacks. Active shooter drills. 

And then there's the Rapid-Deploy Safe Room System from KT Security Solutions, which has recently been deployed in a school in Alabama (to the tune of $60K per classroom). This product is a:

... “functional white board that can be customized to fit any classroom and expands into a fold-out room in under 10 seconds to serve as a protective shield, storm shelter, or additional meeting space inside the classroom...The device “provides ballistic shield for an entire classroom of students and staff” and can stop .308 caliber ammunition. (Source: Vice)

And a selling point is that a four year old can single-handedly deploy the safe room. (Shades of the black-and-white TV ads for Castro Convertibles which showed a four year old in a nightgown opening up the Castro sofa and converting the family living room into the guest room.)

KT Security Solutions "builds ballistic, rapid-deployment housing units for the military warfighter in our forward operating bases around the world." Founder Kevin Scott says that the impetus for creating the school safe room was Uvalde. 

Scott isn't happy that there's a need for his product, but, in the wake of Uvalde, he felt he needed to do something to save children. Although Scott may not be thrilled, he does see a good business opportunity.

There are currently two [school safe rooms] deployed and he hopes to grow the company quickly. "Our goal is to have a million classrooms in a year. That's what we want. There's three to five million classrooms around the United States."

Even if the price goes down with volume, this could certainly be a pretty lucrative business.  

Scott is relieved that the Alabama school is finding other uses for their safe room.

"The teachers said the kids actually call it the 'Calm Zone,' and they actually call it the 'Calm Cottage' now. She [Alabama teacher] leaves hers deployed all the time and it is a reward system that she has put in her elementary class where, when the kids do good things, they get a good grade, they read all their stuff, they do all their homework, they get a little free time on Friday in the Calm Cottage," he said. "They can go in there and do free reading, play little table games and things like that. So it's actually had the exact opposite effect of what you and I would have thought before we had them implemented."

"That's been a blessing that I didn't see coming," he added.

Unfortunately, the blessing I don't see coming is the nation gathering the will to do something about the rampant, Wild West use of guns in this country. 

What we're doing to our children is ghastly, just ghastly.