When his students express their weariness of constant lockdown drills, a sympathetic New York City math teacher offers them some cold comfort. Statistically, he says, they’re likelier to be hit by a car than they are to die in a school shooting. But traffic collisions don’t get constant media coverage, counters a teenage girl: Vigilant hyper-awareness of classroom gunfire has made her so anxious she’s reluctant to attend school at all.
Crisply editing scenes of school life, teacher training, board meetings and trade shows across the country, without accompanying commentary,’s quiet, sober-minded film is ultimately chilling in how it depicts the day-to-day normalization of the unspeakable.
While the shadows of Columbine, Sandy Hook and the like loom long over Chandler’s study, they aren’t specifically remembered or addressed in the film: Recent in many of our memories, such atrocities are ancient history to the school-age children now living with their unhappy legacy, by which panic has morphed into dull habit. Drills prompt exasperation from students and teachers, but no idle joking.
He’s one of many educators across the country who has decided that school staff should be armed, not merely alert. Elsewhere, we watch a mild-mannered first-grade teacher as she embarks on a course of military-level firearm training along with other colleagues: a spectacle of cold, near-surreal cognitive dissonance, not lightened by her questionable rationalization that “you can either plan to fail or fail to plan.
Is it worth it? “Bulletproof” neither finds, nor advances, clear answers: If something as horrific as a mass shooting doesn’t occur at a school, that’s not to say it’s been actively prevented. In patient, thoughtfully captured classroom scenes, pre-teen students list “being shot” among their greatest everyday concerns, while a principal admits that he’d rather invest money in the mental health of his students than on a veritable school arsenal.
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