it might wake up some people despite the horror felt by seeing the physical damage these guns are producing to innocent people for profit by the gun industry because it seems like nothing else will wake the public up and quit playing nice because people do not want to see the physical horror these guns produce

The only use for these weapons are active military in a war zone - and they receive training. And I fear that you're right. Maybe the public needs to be educated about the devastation to the human body that they cause, apparently just hearing about it isn't enough, as we did after Uvalde.

Because of the GOP kowtowing to the “gun rights above all other rights” lunatics, I have watched the school where I’m employed slowly morph into something resembling a prison. Since Uvalde, about 100 miles from here, this district has slowly “hardened the perimeter” of our school with locked iron gates in the back entrances, low chain-link fencing all around the playground, and electronic locks on all outside doors; all bandaide approaches since an AR could easily destroy any locking mechanism. We have a full-time armed / uniformed / SRO (he is a nice guy) with a bulletproof vest patrolling the halls and checking every classroom door to make sure they are locked. They had to hire SROs at all 3 schools because teachers were surveyed to see if there was any interest among us in having a firearm at school and there was zero interest. Gone are the days when teachers could leave classroom doors open, or have children work on large projects in the hallways where they have more space. Every interior door on campus has been retrofitted with a second armor-plated locking mechanism at the bottom of the doors that, again, could be rendered useless by someone intent on doing harm, and besides, our classroom doors all have large windows. I suppose those will be the next to go. Then there are the intruder drills, which studies have shown are taking a toll on mental health. Last year, someone in the neighborhood thought they saw a suspicious person near the school which turned out to be a false alarm. Since we were placed on lockdown for over an hour it was obvious that this was not a drill, and we had children in tears. A colleague said she had to console a student who was crying and saying, “My sister (5th grader) could already be dead.” Panicking parents showed up demanding to retrieve their kids.

And I will never forget, or forgive, our district for having the SRO who got shot during the 2018 Santa Fe H.S. shooting as the keynote speaker at our 2019 opening convocation. It was like, “Hey, welcome back, y’all, now here’s the brave guy who miraculously survived bleeding out after getting shot trying to protect a school.” He was obviously still traumatized as he described in graphic detail what he witnessed and the injuries he sustained that day, all in the course of several minutes. Then, that afternoon we all attended the “Stop the Bleed” training at our campuses where we practiced stuffing cotton into large wounds on practice dummies. Really bizarre. Welcome back, now are you ready when the bullets fly?