I recently walked into my school’s gymnasium for a staff meeting. Our well-beloved school officer set up at the front of the room to train us on what to do in the case of a school shooting.

As I listened to the training go on, I felt the anger building up inside of me. Why are we choosing this reality? Why are we more willing to prepare millions of teachers and students for a potential school shooter instead of addressing the root causes and stopping them from happening in the first place?

In our staff meeting we learned how school shooters are often young men who attended the schools they choose for their crimes. We learned that our stress will affect our ability to make decisions in the dangerous moment.

We’re told about how the gun powder can set off the fire alarms and the sprinkling systems and how those fire alarms may trigger kids to line up at the doors or to leave the building — the opposite of what we want them to do if there’s a killer among them. We’re told about the deafening sounds of the alarms and screams and the gun shots that we’d hear. I never thought about this before — the chaos, the noise.

Then we separated into different classrooms so that a team of officers could fire blanks in the hallways. We needed to learn what gun shots sound and smell like.

As I imagined huddling in corners surrounded by terrified and crying children and thought about laying down my life for these kids — even though I have five children of my own who need their mother — I filled with rage.

Educators are given red medical bags meant to triage gunshot wounds. We’re taught how to stick our fingers inside wounds to staunch the bleeding — how to pack gauze inside little bodies. We’re taught how to make the tourniquets so tight that our “patient” will likely be screaming in pain, but that a tourniquet can save a life.

I pray to God that I never need to use all this training.

I’m enraged that we keep choosing to prepare for school shootings instead of preventing them in the first place. I’m enraged that I go to work everyday to teach kids how to be kind and regulate their emotions and do multiple-digit addition with regrouping and, yet, I also need to know what to do in the face of the most horrifying kind of violence.

I’m enraged that it always turns into a debate about this being a mental health issue versus a gun issue when it’s so obviously both. Meanwhile, our current government has cut funding for mental health across the board and has also loosened gun restrictions.

We’re doing the exact opposite of addressing this nightmarish problem.

I don’t believe the writers of the Second Amendment could have ever imagined in their wildest dreams the phenomenon of mass shootings — or that they would happen in schools. They never could’ve imagined the advanced weapons that everyday citizens could access. They never could’ve imagined corporations and politicians putting profits above the lives of children.

I teach a mixed-age special needs class. My students are just like those students in Bend, Oregon. I am just like that teacher who was killed. I am just like that teacher who had to wrestle a young man to the ground and watch him die as he too was shot and killed. I am just like that teacher who then had to triage gunshots wounds, call 911, comfort other children and eventually wash blood off my hands.

As their blood drains from their bodies, so does the blood of my students. So does mine. For I am them, and they are me.

I beg all of you to vote for politicians who favor funding for mental health care and strict gun laws. I beg all of you to sacrifice your worship of firearms over the lives of children. I beg you to take action, change the course of our culture and choose a different reality.

I beg you.

Brenna Kimber is a special education paraeducator in South Jordan.

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