SUNDAY, JUNE 12 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE ASUNDAY OpinionOnce the classroom door is locked, we’re told, we can’t let a student back in — no matter what.HOLLY STAPLETON FOR THE WASHINGTON POSTBY MADELINE VOSCHIwork at a Title I public high school in Texas that is
70 percent Hispanic, and where 60 percent of the
students are categorized as economically disad-
vantaged. There is so little I can do for my
students, but so much I’m supposed to do.
Something is wrong with the heating and cooling
system. My classroom is always freezing. Some days in
winter, it’s 55 degrees inside; even in late May, it’s cold.
So I become an HVAC tech: I bring in a space heater.
Students stand in front of it, warming their hands as if
at a hearth.
Early in the school year, my students tell me they’re
hungry. “I’m sorry I’m so out of it, Miss,” one says. “I
haven’t eaten since yesterday morning.” I bring
snacks, stock my classroom with granola bars and
Goldfish. I learn which teachers bring ramen noodle
cups, which offices keep oatmeal.
One day, a student misses lunch and tells me she’s
going straight to work after school. She won’t eat until
midnight; her bank account is empty. I walk her to the
vending machines, pay for her Pringles — a small
token from my small paycheck. My fellow teachers
and I become a food pantry, spread out across the
school.
In fall 2021, my school district defied Gov. Greg
Abbott (R) by implementing a mask mandate. I’m not
legally allowed to ask my students whether they’re
vaccinated, though I can tell them I am. I remind
them, again and again, that their masks must go over
their noses. We keep the desks pushed apart except in
classes where there are so many students, it’s physical-
ly impossible. If a student gets covid-19, I have to
notify everyone they’ve been in contact with. I become
a public health worker, trying to contain the virus.
Some students in my classes work full time, are
their families’ primary breadwinners. One student,
not yet a senior, will work 10-hour days this summerbecause she wants to send money to her younger
sisters, who live in a different town. When she and
others ask me about budgeting, I become a financial
adviser.
No one in the school is allowed a locker — it could be
used to store weapons. We have lockdown drills and
lockout drills. I become a safety marshal, a command-
er of a tiny army, the last thing standing between my
students and whatever is to come.
My classroom is on the second floor. My students
tell me that if there’s a shooter, they’ll run, they’ll jump
out the window, despite what we practice. “Miss,” they
say, “it’d be so dangerous to stay. The shooter has been
in the drills. They’d know where we’d be hiding.”
I try to explain the physics to them — that where we
are is higher than they think. But I’m not a science
teacher. I can’t tell them which risk is greater: jump-
ing or standing still.
I’ve had to think about this scenario more than I
care to say. How many seconds it would take to run
across the room to lock the door. Where I would move
the desks to best protect my students. What I could say
if a student tried to run. How to keep them calm and
quiet, keep them from calling their parents. What I
would do if a student were locked out and I couldn’t let
them in.
Once the classroom door is locked, we’re told, we
can’t let a student back in — no matter what. The
shooter could be standing next to the student, using
them to get inside the room.
In that moment, I’d become a powerless god. The
last person they might ever see, telling them no, I can’t
do anything. I cannot keep you safe.
I can help my students find apartments, apply for
jobs. I can walk them through college applications. I
can tell my undocumented students how to get finan-
cial aid without a Social Security number. I can call a
transgender student by their correct name, can sit
with them when they tell me the nurse dead-namedthem over and over, that it made them panic, that they
just want to go home. I can tell them I’m sorry, it’s not
okay for the nurse to do that.
But I can’t think of what to say to them about the
shooting in Uvalde, Tex., because this happens again
and again, and no one does anything. There is nothing
I can say to a student who stops coming to school
because they don’t feel safe.
One of the teachers in Uvalde, who lived through
one of the worst things imaginable, told a reporter:
“That’s my baby, too. They are not my students. They
are my children.”
These are my kids. We teachers, we staff, try to feed
and care for these students because they’re ours,
because they are beloved. But the roots of the prob-
lems they face grow outside the classroom walls.
We are asked to tell children who come to school
hungry that if they work hard, they can have a different
life. Meanwhile, the school is falling apart around us.
We barely have the resources to teach and yet we are
asked to take on more. In the next school year, teachers
in my district will have one less planning period; they
have to teach an additional class because the district
can’t afford to hire enough teachers.
We’re asked to be guards, caretakers, public health
officials, life coaches. It’s impossible to do everything,
but we’re asked to do it all because no institution
outside our schools will.
The police won’t keep my students safe. Politicians
won’t regulate guns. Billionaires won’t pay their taxes,
money that might go to the schools. So we teachers do
more. And when we can’t, it’s the most vulnerable
children who feel the effects.
The teachers in Uvalde acted as human shields,
giving their lives to try to save their students. But the
truth is, no matter how hard we try, we can’t keep
them safe on our own.Madeline Vosch is a writer and teacher based in Austin.Texas teachers are asked to do it all.But some things, we just can’t.The Constitution is not a suicide
pact, Justice Robert H. Jackson
wisely observed in a 1949 free-
speech case. As the Supreme
Court prepares to decide its first gun
rights case in a dozen years, an updated
version of Jackson’s motto should be: The
Constitution is not a mass suicide pact.
That is, the protections of the Bill of
Rights, including the Second Amend-
ment, need not be interpreted in a way
that forecloses reasonable limits and reg-
ulations. On that score, it’s worth quoting
Jackson’s admonition in full: “There is
danger that, if the Court does not temper
its doctrinaire logic with a little practical
wisdom, it will convert the constitutional
Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.”
There have been few times in the his-
tory of the Supreme Court when its doc-
trinaire logic was more in need of temper-
ing and practical wisdom.
Any day now, the court is poised to
decide New York State Rifle & Pistol
Association v. Bruen , a challenge to a
New York law requiring that people seek-
ing licenses to carry a concealed handgun
show “proper cause,” defined as “ a special
need for self-protection.”
The opinions are probably in their
final stages, so this column is an eleventh-
hour plea to the justices to pause and
consider — in light of the massacres in
Uvalde, Tex., and Buffalo, and the nation-
wide epidemic of gun violence — the
consequences of their ruling. The lan-
guage they use matters enormously, notso much for the pending case but for the
scope of what other gun regulations will
be deemed permissible.
I’m under no illusion here. The court
did not take this case to uphold the New
York law. Conservative justices have been
itching to further define the contours of
the Second Amendment for years. They
have one legitimate point — and one
scary gripe.
The legitimate point is this: Since the
court found in 2008 in District of Colum-
bia v. Heller that the Second Amendment
protects an individual’s right to bear
arms in self-defense, the lower courts
have been left without further guidance
about what approach to apply in assess-
ing the constitutionality of gun laws.
The scary gripe is that as the lower
courts have coalesced around a standard
for reviewing gun regulations, they have
focused on the Heller court’s admonition
that the Second Amendment “is not un-
limited.” As a consequence, lower courts
have overwhelmingly rejected challenges
to the constitutionality of gun restric-
tions — leading some conservative jus-
tices to bemoan courts’ supposed treat-ment of the Second Amendment as a
“second-class right.”
But the courts — including a number
of judges appointed by Republican pres-
idents — were just doing their jobs as set
out in Heller. “Nothing in our opinion
should be taken to cast doubt on long-
standing prohibitions on the possession
of firearms by felons and the mentally
ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of
firearms in sensitive places such as
schools and government buildings, or
laws imposing conditions and qualifica-
tions on the commercial sale of arms,”
Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the
five-justice majority. And, he added in a
footnote, “We identify these presump-
tively lawful regulatory measures only
as examples; our list does not purport to
be exhaustive.”
Heller, in my view, was wrongly decid-
ed, but this language could leave, in the
hands of justices willing to elevate practi-
cal wisdom over doctrinaire logic, signifi-
cant room for reasonable regulation.
Then again, this is not the court that
decided Heller. The limitations it im-
posed on gun rights, as Justice John PaulStevens revealed later, were added at the
insistence of Justice Anthony M. Ken-
nedy, the price of his joining the majority.
But today, there are six conservative
justices, not five. Kennedy has been re-
placed by Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh; as
an appeals court judge, in a follow-on
case to Heller, Kavanaugh wrote a dis-
senting opinion asserting that the Dis-
trict’s ban on assault weapons violated
the Second Amendment because such
firearms are in “common use” and were
not historically regulated. Likewise, he
said, the District’s mandatory gun regis-
tration law was unconstitutional “be-
cause the vast majority of states have not
traditionally required and even now do
not require registration of lawfully pos-
sessed guns.”
And Justice Amy Coney Barrett, as an
appeals court judge, wrote a dissent argu-
ing that a man convicted of felony mail
fraud should not have been stripped of
his right to have a gun without any indica-
tion that he posed a danger — notwith-
standing the court’s seeming support in
Heller for “long-standing prohibitions on
the possession of firearms by felons.”
Where does that leave things? As I said,
the New York law, similar to that in six
states, is almost certainly going down.
The critical question is how. Will the
conservative justices use the opportunity
to cut back on the kinds of permissible
gun regulations outlined in Heller? If so,
their timing could not be worse — or the
impact more unfortunate.RUTH MARCUSThis is the exact wrong time for the court to loosen gun lawsConservative justices have been itching to further definethe contours of the Second Amendment for years.They have one legitimate point — and one scary gripe.D
o you worry that there are too many
people in prison? You should. Do
you want to end mass incarceration
and curtail abusive policing tac-
tics? Yes, please. Let’s do all that. But we
won’t achieve any of it unless we remember
two key things:
Crime matters. Disorder matters.
That’s the lesson of the recall vote that
this past week sent San Francisco’s progres-
sive District Attorney Chesa Boudin pack-
ing. Even in an ultra-liberal city such as San
Francisco, it turns out, safe, clean and quiet
streets are a prerequisite for any really
ambitious reforms.
The progressive prosecutor movement
grew out of a moment when it was possible
to forget that, or at least pay it little mind.
The United States was comfortably nestled
in the trough of a decades-long decline in
reported crime, so reform-minded prosecu-
tors were free to focus on allaying the
cruelty that our justice system inflicts upon
those accused of crimes.
Those prosecutors were right that the
criminal justice system is too often a vicious,
inhumane mess. But — say it with me now!
— crime matters a lot to voters, and when it
increases, the political support for leniency
is apt to evaporate. So while we should be
looking for ways to make the system less
draconian, with crime rising everywhere,
we need to make sure we find ones that
don’t make crime more likely. Like, say,
declining to prosecute crimes that you’ve
deemed inconsequential but that voters
won’t.
Progressives talk a lot about addressing
the root causes of crime, but they forgot that
one of the most important is human nature.
We are selfish and greedy beings, and if
crime is rewarding, or disorder tolerated,
some people will engage in antisocial behav-
iors even if all their material needs are met.
It is the job of the criminal justice system to
deter that.
Unfortunately, the hardest-to-deter peo-
ple are often those from disadvantaged
backgrounds and neighborhoods, in part
because they have less to lose from getting
caught. Progressives are understandably
reluctant to hurt those folks. But of course,
the victims of their crimes are dispropor-
tionately other disadvantaged people. For
that matter, these offenders are often their
own worst victims: A life of crime isn’t
something to wish for anyone.But if progressives are wrong about the
problem, conservatives are wrong about the
solution; too often, they try to deter crime
through ever-harsher punishment. Yet
crime and public disorder are generally the
product of people who have poor impulse
control and short time horizons, often be-
cause of underlying mental illness or sub-
stance abuse problems.
For them, a 1-in-1,000 chance of a five-
year prison term doesn’t necessarily offer
much more deterrence than a 1-in-1,
chance of a one-year term — and a 50 per-
cent chance of one night in jail, or a month
under house arrest, might well be more
effective than either of the more severe, but
less likely, punishments. This suggests a
potential platform for the Democratic Party
that combines compassion for victims with
mercy for offenders: ease the severity of
punishment, but increase its likelihood.
What would that mean in practice?
Instead of defunding the police, re- fund
the police, putting more cops on the beat and
improving training. Instead of refusing to
prosecute low-level property crimes, add
prosecutors and courts so that those crimes
can be adjudicated immediately, and light
but swift punishment dispensed. Build ro-
bust alternatives to incarceration — treat-
ment diversion, intensive probation, house
arrest — but understand that those pro-
grams often get more effective when judges
have the power to dispense a couple of nights
in jail when offenders violate the conditions
of their release. Provide more treatment
beds for substance abusers and the mentally
ill, but make it clear that camping on public
sidewalks is not a viable alternative to get-
ting clean or taking antipsychotics.
Most important, don’t try to convince
voters that the crime and disorder around
them represent some kind of romantic re-
bellion against an unjust system, or simply
an unavoidable price of living in a city. Cities
can be crowded without being squalid, as
New York proved for years. And it is not
justice to ask people who work and pay their
taxes to tolerate their streets being used as
bathrooms and drug markets, their proper-
ty being stolen or destroyed, their persons
being threatened.
Instead, try arguing that crime is a
scourge for which individual people are
responsible — not just “the system.” But
note that the people responsible for those
offenses against public order are human
beings who sometimes make mistakes, like
all human beings do. And finally, outline
your plan to build a humane but effective
system that will firmly discourage them
from making such mistakes again.MEGAN MCARDLEHow Democratsshould talkabout crimeProgressives talk a lot aboutaddressing the root causesof crime, but they forgotthat one of the most importantis human nature.