NY Teacher: How a Lockdown Changed My Mind on Guns in School

On July 29, Breitbart News spoke to Mary Anne Marcella, a New York City school teacher who explained that a lockdown at her school caused her to realize that the teacher’s ultimate defense is a firearm.

Mary Anne was teaching at the end of spring semester 2016 when the loudspeaker boomed, “We are in lockdown. This is not a drill.” It was the first actual lockdown she had experienced. And while part of her kept thinking it was not real — i.e., perhaps it was a false alarm — her training for such situations kicked in and she locked her classroom door, covered up the glass in the door, pulled down the shades on the windows and turned off the lights. She moved her 30 students to a corner away from the door and they waited together in the silence for nearly 5 minutes.

She asked herself different questions with each passing minute. At the 60 second point, her thoughts revolved around the self-assuring tendency that the alarm had to be false. Two minutes into the lockdown, she saw worry on her students’ faces and tried to reassure them. In do doing, she fought to be sure they could not see that concern was welling up in her too.

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