It was a day when the rhetoric to end gun violence against children collided with reality at an East Baltimore elementary school.
Students no more than 10 years old had drawn posters and written slogans on how to stop the flow of guns. The posters and slogans were taped to the cinder-block walls of the cafeteria.
One student wrote: "Children are dying. Parents are crying. Gun violence is not cool a bit. So let's quit." Another poster said: "Click, click. Pop, pop. Topple over. Life stops."
Then there was the standard Tench Tilghman Elementary School safety pledge, recited by the 100 youngsters who gathered to hear the mayor and police commissioner describe a new program to prevent the children from becoming shooting victims.
That was followed by a brand-new one, the Gun Safety Pledge. It goes: "If I see a gun or anything that looks like a gun, I will not touch it. I will get an adult because guns can hurt me. And I want to be safe."
Honesty, the adults said, is the only way to level with young children, who know about the consequences of gunfire at an all-too-early age.
Tench Tilghman, on North Patterson Park Avenue at East Monument Street, is the first school in Maryland to offer a new program called Straight Talk About Risks, which is integrated into the daily curriculum.
It is aimed at teaching students ways other than guns to resolve disputes, how to resist peer pressure, and how to distinguish between violence seen on television programs and violence in real life.
The program was designed by the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence, chaired by Sara Brady, whose husband, James Brady, was disabled after being shot in the head during a 1981 assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan. Mrs. Brady was at the school yesterday for the program's introduction.
"It is our promise to you to tell the truth and help you learn the things you need to learn to make good decisions about yourself," Police Commissioner Thomas C. Frazier told the children, who had gathered for the kickoff news conference yesterday morning.
More than 40 percent of school's 660 elementary students know someone who has been shot, school officials said.
And when Sandra Wighton, an assistant superintendent for city schools, asked how many youngsters in the room had ever heard gunfire in their neighborhoods, nearly all the students raised their hands.
"If you can change behaviors one person at a time, then we hope that by the time your children are in school, and someone asks the same question, no hands will be raised," Ms. Wighton said.
They included students such as 10-year-old Virginia Ferguson, a smiling fifth-grader who enjoyed the limelight in front of television cameras. Later, she said her mother survived a shooting three years ago.
"I was asleep," Virginia recalled, her smile broken. "My grandmother came running in to the house and said my mother had just got shot and they had taken her to the hospital. I burst out crying."
Officials want to spread the program to other city schools. "We look to you to lead the rest of the city," Ms. Wighton told the students.
Earlier this month, Kenya Rogers, 12, was shot and killed in front of her cousin's East Baltimore rowhouse, the latest child to die in gunfire this year.
Since 1993, doctors at the Johns Hopkins Children's Center have treated 65 children with bullet wounds, more than double the 32 victims treated in the previous 24 months. In the past four years, 10 of those children have died.
Mrs. Brady said that national studies have shown one in 20 high school students have reported carrying a gun into a school during the previous month.
She told the youngsters that when she was an elementary school teacher 25 years ago, "we didn't have very much to worry about. The worse problem was staying in line or maybe chewing gum or talking out without raising your hand."
"And no schools ever needed security officers," she said.
Before the news conference began, Mrs. Brady and Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke studied the posters hanging on the wall, trying to TTC decide which one was best. The mayor particularly liked one by a boy who drew a store that buys handguns rather than sells them.
"To a certain extent, it is disheartening that they know about so much relating to handgun violence at this age," the mayor said later. "On the other hand, it is heartening to see that they have an intolerance level about guns that may be helpful in the future."
The trick will be getting the students to remember that once outside the classroom.
"You have to teach them to take what they learn in here out there," said Tilghman Principal Elizabeth Turner. "And that is the toughest part. It's a a whole different world across the street."