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Patricia Jaeger's avatar

I used to believe that it was the right thing to vote for the person who best represented what I believed in, regardless of the political party. That belief died many years ago. I now vote for all Democratic candidates and I vote in every election. Even if there was a Republican candidate who appeared to stand for the same values as I believe in, they are all held in lockstep by the GOP. They lie and you cannot trust any of them. I'm so lucky that my 25 year old daughter was not part of the active shooter school population either in grade school, high school or college (private schools in CT and MA). She never had to go through a shooting drill. She suffers from PTSD and has anxiety attacks because of an abusive father (my ex) and I can't even think of how devastating a drill would have been for her. I'm a retired academic and when university school shootings began we attended a meeting with campus safety officers. They told us to pile desks up against the classroom door to keep a shooter out. We explained that all classroom doors opened outward into the hallway (they were unaware of this) and that since the building we were in was built in the 70's, the windows did not open. We asked if they could put deadbolt locks on the classroom doors but they said that a shooter could come into the classroom, lock the door, and shoot us all. We patiently explained that any shooter could do that already with doors that opened into the hallway and no window escape. They had no answers.

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Antonia Malchik's avatar

Ever since my kids started school, every day I send them in knowing it could happen there, that day. They were toddlers when Sandy Hook happened, and we lived not an hour’s drive from that town.

I’ve heard Ryan Busse (author of Gunfight; he lives near me in Montana) talk about the political will and capture by the NRA of so many things, including people’s fear of “having our guns taken away.” It all runs so deep.

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