The fear of minors after the Uvalde massacre: "I haven't gone back to class, I'm afraid they'll shoot me"

Elizabeth Bechard lives in Durham, North Carolina, and is the mother of six-year-old twins, a boy and a girl.

She was at home when she learned on Twitter on Tuesday of the killing of 19 children (and two teachers) at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, 1,500 miles away.

She couldn't help but burst into tears.

That day her children had not gone to class because they were sick.

The boy hugged her and asked what was wrong with her.

"She was scared to see me so affected," she recalls.

On Friday, she cried again.

It was when she sent her daughter to class for the first time in days.

“You send it knowing that anything could happen.

I don't feel like she's especially protected."

Bechard is one of the millions of mothers in the United States who have felt a deep chill this week when they saw the news.

"It is unavoidable;

It is not difficult to put yourself in the shoes of these people,” says Claudia Suaznabar, who lives in Washington and has a daughter in elementary school the age of the children murdered in Texas.

The older students of her school, Oyster Adams, have organized this week on their own initiative a march “to the White House” to demand that politicians “take action on the matter”.

"We used to do fire drills in class," recalls Suaznabar.

“Our children are taught to survive a mass shooting.

It's creepy that they have to learn that, but at the same time it's reassuring that they do."

Journalist Ana B. Nieto, who lives in New York, was surprised, on a Friday in 2019, by one of those “

” (literally: isolation drills).

She had gone to her eight-year-old son's school with sweets to celebrate her birthday.

"They put us in an office, they closed the door and asked us not to look out the small window that overlooked the corridor," she says.

She heard the footsteps of the police, the silent sweep of the school.

“I thought about how the gunshots would resonate in that silence.

I lost track of time, while those who were locked up with me went about their business;

someone even did crossword puzzles.

I only knew that my son was 4 or 5 doors away, and I wondered what was going through his head.”

The rules for these drills differ slightly from state to state, but they all require three to five times a year (so if they start when kids are four or five, they end up participating in as many as 70 before they're done). graduate).

You have to close the doors of the classrooms, turn off the lights, separate the children into groups to, if necessary, minimize casualties, teach them to keep quiet and point out the best places, such as cupboards, that corner that is a blind spot or under the teacher's table, to hide.

A mock response to a school shooting in Washington, Ohio, in 2013.Craig Ruttle (AP)

Aware that the shock wave from Uvalde had reached the walls of her school, the principal of another school in downtown Washington, Marie Reed, an elementary school, sent parents an email this Thursday to reassure them.

She reminded them of the security measures at the school: doors always closed, bells and video circuit and two guards (unarmed).

And Nieto could not help wondering this Friday in a telephone conversation from New York if all this is a "sufficient defense when someone enters with weapons of war", like the one used by the murderer this week.

The director's email spoke of the drills, about whose psychological impact on students there is a debate in the United States —although the parents consulted for this report say that their children experience them as something natural—.

She also shared articles with tips on the best way to talk to children about what happened.

“It is an almost impossible balance.

You want them to know what has happened, but at the same time you want to protect them," says Bechard, who recalls that "the latest shootings, like the recent one in Buffalo [10 African-Americans killed in a supermarket], have mostly affected minorities."

Both the District of Columbia (Washington) and New York, whose governor, Katy Hochul, has ordered the reinforcement of police patrols in the wake of the Uvalde massacre, are among the places in the country with the most restrictive laws on possession of weapons.

The same cannot be said for North Carolina.

Bechard recalls that the state in which he lives —and in which he studied, "when you had to know which neighborhood was better not to go to, but there were no school shootings"— has two Republican senators, who "have received millions and millions of dollars from the gun

, the NRA, to keep the laws from changing.”

Rejection of gun control

At the NRA's annual meeting, held this weekend in Houston, 250 miles from the tragedy, North Carolina's defiant lieutenant governor, Mark Robinson, told a roaring audience that the solution is not greater control over sales. guns and rifles, but "spend on protecting schools as much as is spent on protecting airports, banks, money and those Democratic politicians, communist leftists, in Washington."

The staunch defenders of the Second Amendment grasped in the first moments after the Uvalde tragedy that the problem was not that the murderer, Salvador Ramos, 18, had been able to buy two assault rifles, but his mental health and the responsibility of society in its deterioration.

As the lapses in security at Robb Primary School have become known – the young man was able to enter through a door that someone left open, and it took the police, waiting for backup, 45 minutes to break into the class where Ramos was—, the NRA has changed its attack strategy: if the educational center had been better armored, the tragedy could have been avoided.

A metal detector on the first day of school at a school in Albany, New York State, in 2016. Mike Groll (AP)

After Robinson, Donald Trump spoke in Houston, who when he was president dusted off an old Republican aspiration to solve the problem: arm teachers.

It was in response to the massacre at a Parkland (Florida) institute.

That day, in which 17 students died, he was fixated on the tragic story of school shootings.

The first of which there is a record occurred in 1927, but it was the Columbine massacre (in 1999; 13 dead, plus the two murderers) that marked a before and after, in the same way that the Sandy Hook massacre did in 2012 Elementary School (in Newtown, Connecticut, 26 dead).

So far this year, there have been an estimated 27 school shootings (with 27 dead and 83 injured, according to

.

weapons in classrooms

The Texas Education Agency estimates that some 253 teachers already double duty in the state as security guards.

This is how it is in the town of Utopia, less than an hour north of Uvalde.

For four years, the only school in town has had a handful of weapons scattered around the classrooms at the teachers' disposal.

That decision was made after another shooting in the state, which left 10 dead in the town of Santa Fe. Its director, Brian Hernández, considered on Friday in a conversation with EL PAÍS that this is "the only way" to defend himself.

“The nearest police station is almost 30 minutes away,” he added.

Utopia is a town of just over 200 inhabitants, isolated on the Texas steppe, where, according to a neighbor of the school, Gerry Davis, everyone is armed.

“We are a tough Texan town,” Davis clarified, while his daughter recognized next to him that it gives him “security” that his teachers have weapons.

However, this week she has not gone to class.

"I'm afraid they'll shoot me," she said.

Camila and Gabriela Villegas, 13 and 14 years old, who arrived in Uvalde this Thursday from Crystal City, a 40-minute drive away, have also skipped classes to participate in the improvised tribute set up with 19 crosses in the town's main square, epicenter of the tragedy.

“We haven't even been to the graduation, which was this week.

More than half of our classmates didn't either," said the little sister after placing a white flower on one of the crosses.

The daily life of terror also takes its toll on teachers.

Texas reported last April the highest number of teacher dismissals in decades.

Nearly 500 hires informed the system that they were leaving.

In the last six years, the figure has risen to more than 2,000.

Professor Skyler Walker, who was in sixth grade when Columbine and in college when a shooter killed 32 people at Virginia Tech, blames it on the wear and tear of the pandemic and the gun violence that has taken over classrooms.

“Every time there is a shooting I think it could happen in my classroom,” explains this teacher from a high school on the outskirts of Houston, whose students are mainly Latino children of Central American and Mexican migrants.

On Friday she went to the gates of the NRA convention to protest.

“In class I have to keep the door locked all the time.

That means that if a child asks to go to the bathroom and something happens, I can't open the door for him to come back in, ”she says.

The teacher keeps some metal bars in a drawer to use as weapons if a shooter breaks into the classroom.

“If you have the master key, the insurance won't do any good, so we also practice the art of the barricade.

Each student has a special mission.

Eric Pierce, also a teacher at a public high school in Houston, acknowledges that what happened in Uvalde has left him "very fragile," but he strives to be an example of "understanding and tolerance" so that none of his students "feel lost and become a violent murderer.

He has no plans to leave it.

He also does not plan to give up Walker, who defines himself as “too stubborn” to abandon his boys.

He has, however, drawn a red line that he does not intend to cross: use a weapon in class.

“There are too many coverage risks for insurers.

It's just something politicians say to divert attention.

I always ask my friends to think about their worst teacher in high school.

Would you like me to have a gun?

Of course not.

I certainly don't want to be armed.

What if I should sign up one of my students?” he wonders.

Powerless before the rifle lobby

Gerardo Romo, an employee of the New York City Council, and Amy Withers, a pedagogue, parents of two children aged 10 and 13, consider it "irritating" to also see politicians "blaming the doors, or proposing to arm teachers ”.

“These are solutions that no one has shown to work.

But they say it with total impunity”, adds Romo.

The couple confesses "distressed, desperate and powerless", because "the powerful

of the rifle will not allow anything to change".

"On the contrary, it will happen again," says he, who provides his solutions: "More control over the sale of guns and invest in mental health."

The corollary that Romo offers is overwhelming: “We have to review ourselves as a country.

A country that elevates the supreme values ​​of the family but that does not have maternity leave, and where these massacres take place…”.

A pro-gun control sign at a vigil for Uvalde's victims this Saturday in Sunrise, Florida.

JOE RAEDLE (AFP)

Romo's impression that everything that does not involve restricting access to weapons is far from solving the problem received support from the academic world in 2019, with the publication in the journal

of a study by professors James H. Price, from the University of Toledo (Ohio), and Jagdish Khubchandani, from the University of New Mexico.

After studying the measures between 2000 and 2018 aimed at "turning educational centers into fortresses", measures such as the installation of metal detectors and armored glass and reinforced identification systems, they found "no evidence" that they have contributed to reducing violence with firearms.

"They are adopted," they wrote, "only to alleviate the fears of parents and students and to show that something is being done."

And they don't seem effective at that either.

The most widespread impression this week in the United States has surely been discouragement in the face of an epidemic that no one seems capable of (or determined to) contain, despite its size: according to a record kept by

, from Columbine, unanimously considered the Big Bang of the massacres in schools, it is estimated that 311,000 students and teachers have suffered an episode of violence in class.

With information from

and

, from New York and Houston.

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