One of my teachers from high school posted this and it really got me thinking.
Why not?
First, I don’t understand why there is such a partisan pushback on the idea of having doors that open from the inside but not from the outside. I thought that was pretty standard for secure buildings. Easy to escape in an emergency, difficult to sneak into. Obviously in a perfect world, a school would never have to be a secure building. But we don’t live in a perfect world. So what is the unbearable cost that this policy would impose?
Second, why is any mention of the fact that victims have the opportunity to play an active role in their own lives “victim blaming?”
I started a little business a few years ago. I bought a used Nissan and rented it out online. The very first person to rent it totaled it. Insurance paid out, but I was assured by the website that the renter was legally liable to pay the insurance deductible. She never did. No one ever made her.
I got a new car to rent out and got ripped off by 3 more renters. Don’t worry about me; my net profit was about $3,000 over the course of my 3 year experiment. But, grand total, I was ripped off for about $6,000.
I got a lot of excellent advice from my dad over the course of that experiment.
- Follow up with people an annoying amount when it’s your money on the line.
- Take steps to protect your investments.
- Don’t trust anyone’s word when there is no practical repercussion for breaking it.
This is good advice. What it is not is blaming me for the fact that four people broke legally binding contracts with me and walked away scott free. The fact that anything went wrong was entirely their fault. But that doesn’t mean that I need to just float aimlessly through life suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. I have agency. The only thing I can control is my own decisions. And I am capable of making decisions that will protect me from other people’s misdeeds.
It is not victim blaming to suggest that women not wander down a dark alley at night alone wearing a mini skirt. It is not victim blaming to suggest that people lock their cars in a parking lot. And it is not victim blaming to suggest that, perhaps, a locked door would slow down a school shooter.
Don’t get the wrong idea, I’m not saying anything at all about gun control. That’s an entirely separate debate, and an important one. But what does that have to do with whether doors should be locked or not?
