They Do It Every Time!

Well, here we are, deep into the school year. It's only October, but we have been back to school since before Labor Day- a first for us this year in Pasadena. I have nearly 300 kids signed up to play music in the elementary classes, and all but a handful of the instruments in my inventory are checked out. Kids are blowing in head-joints, buzzing lips, plucking open strings, learning about playing postion and rest position. They are excited, and in every single new class, sometime in this first month, sometime during the relative noise and chaos of those first meetings, someone will turn a clarinet or a trumpet or a violin up, place it on his shoulder (it really is the boys who do this, not girls) make two clicking sounds and then pantomime a kick back, and an innocent musical instrument is transformed into a gun. It is universal. It ALWAYS happens. My response to this is quick and serious: guns are not allowed at school, guns are not a joke, and instruments are never, NEVER guns. Usually I get a wide-eyed stare back, like how-did-she-even-know-what-I-was-doing...as though he was the first person ever to think of doing that.

I remember in the 70's when I had friends my age with small children, and those children were not allowed to play with guns, or weapons of any kind. These kids were not given cap pistols or air rifles or even pop guns, but they DID play with guns. Sticks, trucks, Legos, almost anything, except maybe a stuffed animal could become a gun. I am quite sure that if I had been teaching music classes then, the clarinets would have had their turn as semi-automatic rifles. We, as children, did play with toy guns, had a couple of realistic-looking pistols in a closet high up, where we had to ask permission to get them down. Sometimes we had rolls of caps that fit into the hammer, so that when you pulled the trigger, they made a dandy sound and emitted light, smoke, and the smell of gunpowder.They were fun, but I didn't care much one way or the other about them, and have absolutely no interest in guns, toy or otherwise, now. But, in every new class, in every year for 15 years, and I'll bet for the next 15 years, someone does.

So forgive me, kids, for getting on your cases about it, but in a post-Columbine world, I don't feel I have a choice. I cannot say that allowing 4th graders to weaponize their trombones will result in mass shootings in the high school cafeteria later, and I cannot say that making a big-deal prohibition of this weaponization will prevent such horrors from happening. But if I don't make my speech, I will be forever hearing that click-click kaboom, we will have it in every class, every week, instead of just the first month. I think we're done with it for this year. Good.