Friday, Dec. 7, 2018 | 2 a.m.
For an example of the madness of gun violence in America, put yourself in the shoes of a teacher when a fire alarm goes off at school.
In days past, the protocol was pretty cut-and-dried: walk the students out of the building down a prescribed exit route to a designated safe spot outside.
Now things aren’t nearly as simple.
Faced with the possibility that an active shooter could pull a fire alarm in order to draw out people from classrooms and make them easier targets, teachers now are told not to immediately evacuate, but to look around, assess the situation and use their judgment about whether it’s safe to go into the hall.
Fire? Or active shooter? Which is it? It’s now up to teachers to decide — quickly, on the fly and with the consequence that the wrong choice could leave untold numbers of people dead.
This is how far we’ve fallen: To a point where we’re forcing educators to make difficult life-or-death decisions every time a fire alarm goes off.
It’s one of several examples of how day-to-day lives have been changed by the threat of gun violence, which is among the reasons that decision-makers at every level need to be working toward gun safety.
One critical step is to continue efforts like the task force that Gov. Brian Sandoval assembled this past spring.
For school shootings, the short-term solution needs to come from a number of angles, such as designing more secure buildings, establishing effective protocols for staff, providing training and optimizing law enforcement response.
There’s no easy answer to this; no one-size-fits-all approach to defending schools and
