Michigan Tot Practicing In Bathroom For Active Shooter Scenario Photo Goes Viral
By Christy Strawser
TRAVERSE CITY (CBS Detroit) Like an Instagram shot for a classic American brand, the photo shows a pretty girl in a bright summer dress with soft blonde hair falling from a bun at her neck.
She could be the child of any lucky parent.
But in this photo she's standing in a stark bathroom stall, feet bare, hands on the wall for support, practicing for a situation that dominates the national news: bang, bang, bang.
The child is practicing what to do in an active shooter situation.
The little girl's mom Stacey Wehrman Feeley of Traverse City, thinks the image sends a message about gun control in America.
"Politicians - take a look," Feeley wrote on Facebook. "This is your child, your children, your grandchildren, your great grand children and future generations to come. They will live their lives and grow up in this world based on your decisions."
The post has 8,000 reactions and 11,000 shares.
Many used it as a flashpoint for gun debate.
Rachel Chanel wrote, "I think a lot of people think "well if the good guys had guns they could save people from the bad guys" but a lot of times people aren't seen as "bad guys" until after they do something terrible. Severely mentally ill people are allowed to get guns. But often it's not so oblivious if someone is mentally ill and the more people have guns, the higher the chance of shootings."
On the other side, Jarrot Tan wrote,"Take away the gun... 2nd generation onwards... Criminal would start using knifes... No it doesn't stop the killing.. But at least it makes it easier to catch the target."
The bathroom image is especially compelling considering revelers at Pulse nightclub in Orlando piled into a bathroom to try to save themselves during the latest, and most deadly, such attack. See cell phone video HERE from CBS.
In another bathroom scene, a teacher at Sandy Hook Elementary School shepherded her flock of 15 first graders into a tiny bathroom while a shooter rampaged the building in 2012.
"I was crammed into a bathroom stall with my terror-struck first-graders — boys and girls, most of whom had yet to even learn to tie their shoes — mourning the future we would never have and listening in horror as the teachers and first-graders on the other side of the wall were being massacred, the whole time thinking we were next," teacher Kaitlin Roig-DeBellis wrote later of the incident.
She piled her charges onto every available surface in the three by four foot bathroom, begging them to be silent and telling them she loved them in case those was the last words they ever heard.
They were silent. And while 20 classmates and six staffers were hunted and killed, the class huddled in the bathroom survived.
"They are barely 3 and they will hide in bathroom stalls standing on top of toilet seats," Wehrman Feeley wrote about her daughter's photo. "I do not know what will be harder for them? Trying to remain quiet for an extended amount of time or trying to keep their balance without letting a foot slip below the stall door?"
