NNOMY News June 8, 2019 Guns in Our Schools


 

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NNOMYnews 1025: Guns in Our Schools

 
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‘Rational Fears’: Dozens speak on Nashua North JROTC air rifle course

Grace Pecci / The Telegraph - For many of the students, parents and community members who voiced concerns, it wasn’t the course they were against, it was normalizing any type of gun on campus.

On Friday, senior Paula Durant told The Telegraph, “We all think they should have their marksmanship club, just not on campus. I mean, we grew up with so many school shootings, that (the fear) is a normal thing now.”

Durant had a friend who survived the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Florida and she said she knows other people at North who have connections with people who were in the University of North Carolina Charlotte school shooting and in the most recent shooting in Colorado.

“It’s just normalizing these weapons on campus because they look so much like guns,” Durant said.

(Note: This school ended up approving the shooting range on a 5 for to 3 against vote)

Read more

 
 
 
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JROTC Shooting Ranges Removed from Two Schools

Marshall Blesofsky / Draft NOtices / COMD -  Prior to meeting with the school board about the shooting ranges, we met with the superintendent in late September.  Unlike previous meetings where we felt that the superintendent was somewhat unimpressed by our presentation, this time he was very engaged. When we asked about the status of the shooting ranges, he explained that over the summer, because of construction and renovations, the active shooting ranges at Poly High School and Lakewood High School had been closed permanently! There was another shooting range at Jordan High School that is unused because the JROTC program ended at that school. Jordan High School is also presently being replaced by a new facility.

Read More

 
 
 
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No, Teachers Should Not Carry Guns

Russ Moore / Education Week - Using a gun to defend yourself—which thankfully, I've never done and hope I never will have to do—in any situation is not to be taken lightly. Most people would not have the nerve, rational thought, or skill to do it on the spot. Providing stop-gap "training" would not address the whole picture. You would be taking people who were trained to educate—many of whom had most likely never owned or even fired a gun—and transforming them into the appointed defenders of schools


How sane is that? How much training do swat teams, police officers, or security guards undergo before they are ready to handle these dangerous encounters? How exactly can we ready educators in a shortened time frame? People who become public defenders know what they're getting themselves into. Educators didn't (and don't) sign up for that line of work.


Read more Watch video

https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/10/29/10moore.h34.html

 
 
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High School Shooting Teams Are Getting Wildly Popular — And the NRA Is Helping

Sean Gregory / Time Magazine - At the Minnesota high school trap-shooting championship, more than 8,000 students from some 300 schools gathered in June to blast flying orange discs out of the sky. Over nine days, the sound of bullets firing—hour after hour after hour—-becomes ambient noise, like a supermarket soundtrack. Pop. Pop. Pop.

RVs filled the parking lot. Sponsor tents (the U.S. Army, Friends of NRA, a guy selling Donald Trump T-shirts) lined the Alexandria Shooting Park, a grassy stretch in a lake-dotted region around two hours northwest of Minneapolis. Kids in their team uniforms formed a rainbow of red, orange, green, maroon, all shades of blue. Their shirts bore the names of their scholastic trap-shooting squads and the local outfits that support them. For Crosslake Community School, the list includes a local bank, an insurance broker, the American Legion and Grandpa’s General Store.

Read More

http://time.com/longform/high-school-shooting-teams/

 
 
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Selective Service Registration Comes Under Fire Again

NPR's Morning Edition on May 23rd 2019 includes a report by David Welna, possibly the  only journalist who sat through all of the two days of hearings on Selective Service at which I testified last month before the National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service.

 
May's NPR story is the first mainstream news report on Rostker's
testimony, accuracy of the SSS database, or whether a draft based on the
current system would be possible (regardless of whether it is regarded as
desirable or who supports or opposes it on political or idealogical
grounds).
 
 

 

 
     
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“It Is the Young People Who Will Free Us”: Resisting Militarized Violence, from Honduras to Chicago

 
A transnational conversation between organizers


Gaspar Sánchez and Veronica Morris-Moore / In These Times - Gaspar Sánchez and Veronica Morris-Moore are young organizers from Honduras and Chicago, respectively. Gaspar is a leader of the Civil Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH) and a Lenca indigenous LGBT activist. He was mentored by the late Berta Cáceres, the COPINH co-founder who was assassinated on March 2, 2016. Veronica has been on the front lines of youth struggles in the era of Black Lives Matter, from winning a trauma center to helping oust the state’s attorney who played a role in covering up the Chicago police murder of Laquan McDonald.


Gaspar recently passed through Chicago as part of a national speaking tour when an independent international commission of human rights investigators released a report with evidence directly implicating corporate executives and Honduran state agents in the assassination of Cáceres. In the back hallway of the Pilsen Outpost in Chicago, the two spoke about their parallel struggles against military and police violence in Honduras and Chicago. Matt Ginsberg-Jaeckle, an organizer with La Voz de los de Abajo, interpreted the conversation and translated the interview.


Read more

http://inthesetimes.com/article/20695/

 
 
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Our Founding Members have nominated six individuals and four organizations to be considered for the 2019 US Peace Prize.

The 2019 Peace Prize nominees are:

Ajamu Baraka
Erica Chenoweth
Stephen D. Clemens
Thomas C. Fox
Bruce K. Gagnon
Jewish Voice for Peace
National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth
Sally-Alice Thompson
Women's March on the Pentagon
World BEYOND War.

You may read about their antiwar/peace work in the US Peace Registry.  The information published there will be the only data considered by our Board of Directors when making the selection.  Read about previous recipients at www.uspeacememorial.org/PEACEPRIZE.htm.

The US Peace Memorial Foundation directs a nationwide effort to honor Americans who stand for peace, by publishing the US Peace Registry, awarding the annual US Peace Prize, and planning for the US Peace Memorial in Washington, DC.  These projects help move the United States toward a culture of peace by recognizing thoughtful and courageous Americans and U.S. organizations that have taken a public stand against one or more U.S. wars, or who have devoted their time, energy, and other resources to finding peaceful solutions to international conflicts.  We celebrate these role models to inspire other Americans to speak out against war and to work for peace.

Thank you very much for your ongoing support.


Michael D. Knox, PhD, Chair
US Peace Memorial Foundation

 
 
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Demilitarist School: Report Back from Chicago

War Resisters League - This past April, WRL piloted our first Demilitarist School in Chicago! Over three days, 13 young people and a group of Demil School facilitators, including WRL staff and National Committee members, gathered to grapple with the scale of US militarism.

Participants delved into discussions about strategies for dismantling militarism and the ways anti-militarist work feeds into struggles for Black liberation, immigrant rights, prison abolition, workers rights, queer liberation, and climate justice. Special thanks to Assata's Daughters who generously provided space for the Demil School.

Read more about what participants did each day below:

Day One:
Activities included Trivia on the US War Machine, the Many Limbed Monster of Militarism activity, and a workshop on challenging anti-Black and anti-immigrant sentiments and violence.

During these workshops some big themes started to emerge with participants including: starting to grasp the scale of US military spending and reach; getting grounded in the many ways institutions across sectors are upholding militarism; understanding the links but also differences between anti-Black & anti-migrant violence, and the importance of joint struggle.

Read more

https://www.warresisters.org/demilitarist-school-report-back-chicago

 
 
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It is not important to win prizes:

It is important that we all see each other working for the common good.

Guns and the Gun debate still proliferate in our public schools. This is a struggle for the demilitarization of our society in the midst of the next generation that will inhabit the near future of our society. Or will they begin to occupy it?

War Resisters'International Occupies

 
   
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The National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth (NNOMY). 2019
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