Fighting fire with food

Did you catch this on the evening news? A middle school principal in Valley, Alabama wants to arm her students with cans of vegetables.

It sounds like a joke, or a principal gone crazy. But it’s real.

The principal of Burns Middle School asked children to bring in cans of food to have something to throw should a gunman enter the classroom. And it’s part of a self defense program that goes by the acronym ALICE: Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counterattack, Evacuate.

It’s used at schools around the country, including Lange Middle School in Columbia Missouri where a student video shows Alice stepping out of Wonderland to explain it all to the White Rabbit.

“School shootings are a terrifying business but I’m going to be quite frank about them,” says Alice. “‘C’ is for counter. Think of it like counterattack.”

“That’s awesome!” exclaims the White Rabbit.

But the White Rabbit changes his mind once he realizes it means attacking an armed gunman.

“Isn’t rushing an armed man a bit dangerous?” he asks.

“They don’t want hostages,” replies Alice. “They want victims.”

The kids are taught that if a gunman enters the room, you don’t duck, you throw things.

“And throw them hard, right at his head, because if he’s ducking, he’s not shooting people,” says Alice.

It’s empowering – and also a little depressing to see Alice in Wonderland being used to explain to 12-year-olds how to repel a gunman. But in fact, the kids who put this together were onto something.

What made Wonderland such a scary place after all was because absurd things would happen for no good reason.

Who knew it would actually come true?