The Stay Safe book, sent home with very young children in Dallas, Texas, is using Winnie the Pooh and Piglet to teach kids how to stay safe in a mass shooting.
Stay Safe was produced by a law enforcement consulting firm in Houston to present the FBI-advised tactics for surviving a mass shooting: Run, Hide, Fight. It is legally unlicensed; Winnie the Pooh is in the public domain.
“If it is safe to get away, we should RUN like Rabbit instead of stay,” reads the hand-illustrated book. “If danger is near, do not fear, HIDE like Pooh does until the police appear.”
The “hide” page has a drawing of Pooh burying his head in a pot of honey.
On the following page, Kanga and baby Roo are shown wearing boxing gloves. The text says: “If danger finds us, don’t stay, run away. If we can’t get away, we have to FIGHT with all our might.”
The book was given out to children on Monday, just two days before the one-year anniversary of the Uvalde shooting where 19 children were killed. It was given to students as young as 3 and 4 years old.
“I found it extremely disturbing, and was very uncomfortable with the whole contents of the book,” said one teacher who was required to hand it out to her classrooms.
The teacher added that she was troubled by the distribution of a Winnie-the-Pooh book at a time when Republican politicians in Texas were loosening gun laws.
“The fact that people think it’s a better idea to put out this book to a child rather than actually take any actions to stop shootings from happening in our schools, that really bothers me. It makes me feel so angry, so disappointed.
“It’s a year since Uvalde, and nothing has been done other than this [Stay Safe] book. That is putting it on the kids.”
This is the same state which is banning children’s books featuring LGBT characters, shouting that they might do harm to children. But teaching children to fight armed gunmen using Kanga and Roo is just fine.
Photo: Visanu Pongsuansri / Shutterstock
