Photo: @ caminiti_comedy/ TikTok
Stop! It's hammer time.
By Izzy Casey — Written on Aug 21, 2021
Stop! A high school pre-calculus teacher has taken hammer time to a whole new level.
In the event of a school shooting, the teacher instructs her students to arm themselves with hammers in a viral TikTok video.
Teacher arms students with a hammer in case of a shooting in viral video.
The teacher offers the hammer as defense option in case a shooter enters the school classroom.
“If you’re willing,” the teacher said grabbing a hammer out of the plastic bin, “grab a hammer.”
“What if the shooter isn’t a nail?” someone asked in the comments.
The teacher claimed that she buys a few hammers each year, to stockpile for this purpose.
“They’re not gonna leave here happy,” the teacher says, waving the hammer slowly in the air.
In another TikTok video, the teacher mentions that she prefers hammers with a straight claw to a curve claw.
Alas, she announces, someone bought her the curved claw hammers, which she says “was really sweet.”
The teacher instructed her students to hit attackers with the claw, rather than the end that’s used for hammering.
She also tells her students to hit the school shooters in “places that’s gonna hurt.”
“Hit ‘em in the eyes, OK, in the ears,” she instructs.
TikTok users questioned if a hammer would protect from an active school shooter.
What are the students supposed to do, bop the active shooter on the head and turn them into a goon?
“What if the shooter has a hammer too???” another TikTok user asked.
The creator of the video joked, "Go back and get another hammer."
In the world of cartoon physics, raising a hammer into the air and then down onto an enemy's head is the perfect self-defense strategy.
A school shooter is arguably the farthest thing from Little Bunny Foo, however. Real-life, sadly, is not an episode of Tom and Jerry.
Teachers may not be properly equipped or trained to respond to an active shooter.
In 2021, there were approximately 43 incidents of gunfires on U.S. school campuses and 19 gun injuries.
The Gun Violence Archive defines a mass shooting as “one with four or more people injured or killed, not including the perpetrator.”
Over 600 mass shootings occurred in 2020, and 417 occurred in 2019.
There have been hundreds of mass shootings in 2021 and 16 mass murders.
Telling a teenager to hit a school shooter with a hammer is so bizarre it's almost laughable.
What's devastating about this story, however, is that a teacher felt so unprepared and concerned about a potential school shooting, that had to take matter into her own hands.
Teachers shouldn't be responsible for coming up with their own strategies to protect their students. In times of distress, it seems, people cling to the lessons they've learned from the Road Runner.
"If a man runs off the edge of a cliff, he will not fall," Poet Nick Flynn once wrote, "until he notices his mistake."
If children are armed with hammers, they will not fall, until what?
Izzy Casey is a writer who covers pop culture, entertainment, and news for YourTango. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her writing has been published in The Iowa Review, New York Tyrant, BOAAT, The Columbia Review, Bennington Review, Black Warrior Review, and Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts.