Sean Braisted is right. In the wake of threats against MLK Magnet High School and Hunters Lane High School on Wednesday, the Metro Nashville Public Schools spokesperson told Emily West at NewsChannel 5, “This aligns with a concerning national trend known as ‘swatting,’ aimed at spreading fear among students, parents and staff while also draining valuable law enforcement resources.”
It sure does, Braisted. It sure does. Swatting, for those of you not online enough to have to know about it, is when someone calls in a report of a threat in order to get the police to go to the location provided in the report — when the caller knows that no one at the location is a threat — hoping police will jack up the victim’s life.
Imagine you’re playing Grand Theft Auto Mayberry online with people from all over. The person playing Barney Fife shoots your character, Aunt Bee, in the game. You’re pissed because Barney Fife is only supposed to have one bullet, and he’s not supposed to keep it in his gun. You call him some names. He calls you some names back. You tell everyone else you’re playing with that it’s a good thing cops in the real world aren’t like him, or all old-maid aunts would have to invest in body armor. He says, “You’d better hope they’re not.” Then he calls the police in your town and says he was just walking by your house and heard gunshots and a woman screaming and calling for help.
The police then get all geared up and maybe even call in their SWAT team. They swarm your house, guns drawn, shouting and shooting your dog. Once they figure out that there is no actual threat, oops. You’re terrorized by Barney Fife, who doesn’t even have to be in the same country as you to do it.
The important thing to understand here, though, is that the police are the instruments of terror set into motion by the terrorist. Calling incidents like these hoaxes isn’t really accurate. Maybe there isn't a bomb or an active shooter like a caller claimed, but armed people — i.e., the police — do show up and treat you with hostility. I have an acquaintance whose child attends MLK, and they say they had to hide out in a supply closet for hours, only to be met with police, guns drawn, when they were let out. They were terrorized. All of the kids who were placed on lockdown last week were terrorized. And for what?
I’m sorry, but this is bullshit. There is no need for swarms of armed police to do the work of cowards for them. When you arrive at a school and there’s no sounds of gunfire, and you make contact with the administrators and they are all unaware of any gunshots, why are police with guns drawn going from room to room to make contact with students and teachers? You can’t send teams? Maybe two officers with guns drawn who stand back from the door and one officer with his weapon holstered whose job it is to approach the doors and unlock them? We can’t train our police so that the first person kids see in a crisis doesn’t appear to be ready to shoot them?
I truly don’t understand what’s happened to gun culture in this country. I know I say this all the time, but it’s true, and I want an explanation. I always told myself I was never going to be one of those old people who says things like “Back in my day ...” But sweet Jesus, back in my day you didn’t aim a gun at something you didn’t intend to shoot. And now, as a matter of course, cops go into schools with guns drawn. At some very basic level, this means they are ready to shoot our kids. And when someone successfully spurs the police to point guns at our children, we call it a “hoax” if they didn’t find anyone who was doing the wrong they were promised. As if the perspective that counts is whether the cops found out the bad guy was lying, and not whether the bad guy succeeded in using the cops as their weapon.
On Wednesday, the caller won. They got a response they intended, and their victims were, well, victimized. That is not a "hoax." That is a success.
Listen, Nashville: I love you, but you’re really telling me that we put kids in a building that cradled many of our local civil rights icons when they were in school (Perry Wallace, for instance), that we named in honor of our nation’s best-known civil rights icon (Martin Luther King Jr.), and we can’t envision and implement something better than this traumatic clusterfuck when those kids are being terrorized by whichever as-yet-unknown asshole did this?
The point in honoring the legacies of people who changed Nashville is not so that, oh, the kids can be influenced and inspired by this legacy while we, the people with actual power to change things, sit back and stay the same. If we believe it means something to go to school in that building with that name, then it should mean something to us.
We can develop, implement and insist on a response to terrorism against our schools that centers compassion for the targets of it. We can find ways to ensure our police aren’t weaponized against our children. This is doable. We can do this. And we should.
