“It is easier to raise children right than to
repair damaged adults.”
-          Frederick Douglass


THE KATHLEEN FLYNN MEMORIAL PROJECT:
A Public Safety Schoolhouse Initiative 


(An early draft of this was shared with officials, city and federal, in 2012, after the Sandy Hook shooting.)


    Fast forward: Now that you are packing pepper spray, we don't want you to learn the hard way that unimpaired access – (repeat that please: Un-Im-Paired Access) to those cannisters is key to your safety - and of course most clothing designers don't care about that.
 Right to the point here because there is a battle outside as Dylan sings - and it is raging: Four women are murdered in the U.S. every day, last count, chrissake. 

 How about training women & the little guy to protect themselves against the harm routinely inflicted on them on the street, in the frat house, in their own homes - isn't that long overdue? (Sexual abuse alone harms one in four women, and one in seven men these days - and given that, the funding disparity between boys' sports and self-defense training for those who need it is something on the order of a national disgrace.
Students incur injuries on the athletic fields -- that’s deemed acceptable. (And some researchers say domestic violence spikes on Super Bowl Sunday.) Students are licensed to drive cars though we know the accidents - and the fatalities - that will occur.
But can your children carry pepper spray to school? Or be taught there how to use it? Or be awarded it, in exchange for community service, perhaps, if they can't afford the slight expense?
You got a long way to go, baby, (recalling an ill-advised TV advertising blitz in the ‘70’s encouraging women to smoke .... cigarettes.)
Smoke this:  If you were about to be assaulted, raped - or worse - which would you most want at hand: cell phone, or two cans of pepper spray? 
Push comes to shove, that phone won’t be worth much. But that pepper spray - it can save your life.
Assaults will decrease when women and the little guy carry at least one canister, (two is safer,) within a split-second’s reach - are as quick with them as JLo is with that asp-baton she wields in Out of Sight -- except that was close range, which We Really Want To Avoid.  That spray will stop a predator at 10 feet -- and that's just where you want them.
And where is the school, or the women's advocacy group - where even, the rape crisis center - with the moxie to get this done? We cannot find one. Anywhere. And that is too bizarre, given the harm that can be prevented and the lives that can be saved. 
(It's true, CEO's of two women's crisis centers, (in Cleveland, and L.A.,) disparage pepper spray. Leaving us to wonder, (for neither will explain): Would prevention be bad for fund-raising? Bad for 'business'? (And if the thought is repulsive; the reality is much worse.)

Consider: There were one hundred and fifty-four, (154,) mass shootings in America in the first seven months of 2018. Some of the shooters were stopped by unarmed civilians like Kendrick Castillo, who lost his life protecting his fellow students. Is anyone asking whether Kendrick would have lived had he been carrying pepper spray? (We believe he might well have.) And when more like him carry it, (and train to carry it properly,) those insane shootings should be contained more quickly and safely - or prevented altogether.

We're not minimizing the importance of creating more venues for peaceful dispute resolution in the schools, courts and churches. That, too, is key to solving this problem. (And each of those the institutions should push Desmond and Mpho Tutu's, The Book of Forgiving.)
That's a slow train, though, and long delayed. Until we acknowledge with unflinching honesty the de facto battlefields in our homes, our schools and our streets, the carnage and heartbreak will continue to escalate despite video campaigns like Homeland Security Houston's oddly misguided video, ‘RUN. HIDE. FIGHT.’  
(Houston, we have a problem. Why this talk of defending ourselves with office chairs and fire extinguishers?)
So: At what age might students be trained in this simple, effective means of self-defense?
Kathleen Flynn was raped and murdered walking home from school when she was eleven. Let that be the sobering guideline.
Unless students prove otherwise, why are they not allowed to carry? And if the occasional accident occurs, be it with the temporary irritation of oleoresin capsicum - and not a bullet.

The price - about $17 per - is a bargain as life insurance goes – and far far less than the true costs now being borne by victims, their families and friends; far less than what we now pay for after-the-fact prosecutions, lawyers' fees, therapies, shattered lives, shuttered communities. 

 As for the argument that civilians should leave pepper spray to the police, (some people actually subscribe to that) - doesn’t it leave the civilian just slightly ... vulnerable? 
 Po-po will still be needed to haul the stopped-in-their-tracks attacker off to jail, file the report; testify. And they will be spared walking onto so many grisly crime scenes. 
    Everybody wins.
 
 So, what about criminal use of it?  That theory is not as well-founded as it first sounds if you’ll recall the news story some years back about the store clerk whom robbers incapacitated with hot coffee.
Serious penalties, judiciously applied, would control misuse.
And when more decent people carry it, the action-movie-fueled desperadoes will be outnumbered every time. 

Self-defense schools talk up, "Combat Training in Strikes, Kicks and Blocks!" Sure, it lends drama to the sales pitch and training - (and it may have a place in the continuum of resistance) -- but pepper spray, administered from a cool remove -- surely, that is the best medicine. 

And yet, are teachers allowed to carry it in school? 
Do shelters allow it to battered women and men? 

We’re missing something big here. And paying dearly for it. 

   Do well to take a lesson from Brer Skunk.

Get up, stand up?

Close focus: clipping the cannisters to the outside of cargo pockets is perhaps The safest way to carry. 
(Don't hold your breath for manufacturers to make canisters for lefties. We can't find any.)
    

hayesrowan@gmail
all rights reserved

(See the timidity?)





 




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