Column: The Whiteboard Jungle: Student safety should be the priority when it comes to gun issues

I imagine a moment when an announcement over the P.A. system declares: “This is a lockdown, not a drill.”

Immediately I close the classroom door, lock it, turn off the lights, hunker down under the tables with my students, and stifle their cries.

Should this scenario be part of teacher training courses?

Apparently so, because already teachers in America go through these lockdown or active-shooter drills each year.

I have experienced two real lockdowns at Hoover High School, though no actual threat materialized.

As if the demands of the job aren’t already stretched to incredible lengths, now teachers have to absorb the remote yet real possibility that one day a nightmare may appear in their classroom.

And those educators need to run through in their minds how they will actually handle a situation they don’t ever want to face.

If the perpetrator shoots into the room, do I barricade the door and, if so, can my students help me move heavy items to do it, do we pray under the tables that he won’t see us, do I physically try to take the shooter down, knowing my life and the lives of my students are at risk, or do I actively ignore the current lockdown procedures and make a run for it?

On Wednesday night, CNN held a televised town hall meeting at the BB&T Center in Sunrise, Fla., a 20-minute drive from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, where the Valentine’s Day massacre of 17 students and teachers occurred.

The arena holds more than 20,000 people; the high school has more than 3,000 students. No one was harmed in the arena due to security measures in place. Those measures should be replicated at every single school in the United States.

It would be easier to secure schools than pass stronger gun laws.

President Trump should hold an emergency meeting with his advisers and develop a plan that can be implemented immediately.

Unfortunately, we have a president who needs to have a cheat sheet — “I hear you ”— on how to show empathy for grieving parents, and who believes arming teachers is the way to go.

We are all tired of the cellphone footage of students crouched under desks in terror, the anguish in the parents’ faces upon awaiting the news of their children’s safety, the candlelight vigils, the funerals, the signs, the pleas, the demands to do something, do something, please, please, do something.

Students who study the dangers of driving under the influence are aware that every 15 minutes in the United States a person dies from a car crash. However, during that same time, a person dies in a gun-related incident.

While cars are regulated for safety — seat belts and airbags are credited with lowering the auto fatality rate — guns are not.

The number of deaths, 26, and the young age of the children, 6 to 7 years old, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. along with President Obama’s tearful statement led many to believe that that would be the watershed moment, the turning point when politicians would finally act to stop the rampant gun disease; 200 shootings and 400 deaths later, nothing has happened.

What number of deaths will it take to get everyone’s attention: 50? 100? 500? Maybe the death of a prominent politician’s child or grandchild?

Yet Congress has no problem passing legislation to expand the rights of gun owners. Last December, the House passed HR 38, Concealed Carry Reciprocity, allowing those with guns to travel from state to state and legally carry their weapons.

I pray that I never hear again “this is a lockdown” and that anyone I love ever hears that. Children should not attend school even with the remotest possibility that they may not return home.

Yet in today’s climate, the first sound of an administrator speaking on the P.A. makes everyone jittery.

It is not about blue states versus red states, Democrats versus Republicans, pro-gun versus anti-gun.

It is about having a country where the safety of its children is paramount, a priority superseding a citizen’s right to own a gun.

BRIAN CROSBY is a teacher in the Glendale Unified School District and the author of “Smart Kids, Bad Schools” and “The $100,000 Teacher.” He can be reached at www.brian-crosby.com.