Amidst A Sea Of Poster Board, A Message From PS 139 Students: No Guns
Heads bent over the brightly colored poster boards covering much of the electric blue floor in Maggie Madden’s second grade classroom, students at PS 139 stuck their tongues out in concentration and deliberated how best to depict that they didn’t want guns in their neighborhood – or anywhere.
“I think we should say robbers shouldn’t have guns,” one student said.
“And that it saves lives,” another chimed in.
The ideas kept coming:
“And it saves animals.”
“We don’t want people to get hurt.”
“Guns suck!”
This was the overwhelming consensus from the 7- and 8-year-olds in the class last Thursday, when neighbor and parent Ellen Moncure Wong led a lesson on the Bill of Rights – during which Ellen, who works for the American Civil Liberties Union, handed out copies of the U.S. Constitution, showed a video her son, Ellis, helped to pick out – Schoolhouse Rock’s “I’m Just A Bill,” and had students vote for which of three topics was most important to them: saving the earth, wanting peace, or no guns.
The purple, yellow and green stickers used as ballots on the neon orange poster said it all: no guns.
With PS 139 having been locked down immediately following an October home invasion, when neighbor Leonard Phillips was killed by one of the intruders, violence and crime seemed to be on many of the children’s minds, and numerous posters declared “no guns for robbers.” Several of the children spoke about the recent Church Avenue deli robbery – one of a series of armed robberies that have occurred in our neighborhood.
After the posters were made, the students, their teacher and Ellen exercised their freedom of assembly and marched, posters in the air, down Cortelyou Road.
“You get to march and say, ‘I believe in something,'” Ellen told the children, a number of which pumped their hands in the air upon hearing this.
The students were high-spirited, often waving their posters wildly as storeowners and passersby cheered them on, but the words they were chanting were poignant:
“No murder!” they yelled.
“If you like guns, you like jail!”
“Keep us safe! Keep us safe!”
