Another elementary school has suffered a tragedy that should not happen with the frequency that it does in this country. A teenager fought off police to enter the building and slaughter 21 people, mostly children. Children, whose bodies were so abused by the bullets, could only be identified by DNA. While many of the children in the one classroom are dead, the ones who survived are deeply wounded, some physically, all emotionally. This happened on a Tuesday and by the weekend another story will push it off the front page. Like so many before it is a few survivor victims, family members and a handful of elected officials who will remind us, but often they don’t get the forum they deserve. It is clear we have given up on trying to keep kids safe in order to not even do some reasonable and Constitutional restrictions of gun ownership.
Instead, we run children through drills to deal with the possibility of an active shooter in their school. Those too are traumatizing. Children have suffered psychological damage after such drills. On twitter one father told how his Kindergarten student was taught that if they are near the door as a shooter comes in to wave their arms at the shooter and throw things, so their classmates might have a chance to escape. We are asking 5 year olds to put themselves in harm’s way to save others. Another comment mentioned the fact that if a student is outside the classroom when an active shooter is in the building, you must not let them in the room. Even if they pound on the door and start screaming. One adult who remembers being caught outside the room during one such drill was so unnerving (he didn’t know it was a drill since his school did them by surprise) he needed therapy. “The life of the many must outweigh the life of the few or the one” should never have to be a 1st grade motto.
When events like this occur the camps are already in place. Too often if you raise a concern using the latest example of a shooting you are told to not politicize it. If you talk about common sense gun reform you are attacked for wanting to take everyone’s guns away. If you discuss the gun at all the clap back is we need better mental health or criminals will still get guns. However as I write this the shooting in Buffalo and in Uvalde were committed by 18 year olds with no criminal background to speak of and their mental health issues seemed to be ignored or go unseen. They both had easy access to guns and in fact in Uvalde, the shooter had access directly due to the fact that the law was changed so someone his age could buy the weapons he used with no real questions asked. The law stopped him from buying it sooner, he waited until it was legal. A law that not long ago would have prevented him from buying the weapons until he was 21, but the current state government was embarrassed that more guns weren’t being purchased in their state.
There is no panacea for this, I know that by the time this is read there will likely be another mass shooting. But we can put up speed bumps to perhaps find a way to prevent it. I don’t want people not to be able to own and use fire arms. I know why there is a second amendment and why the founder felt the need for a state based way of responding to tyranny. I know what it is like to have a loved one murdered in my home. I know that guns are both a way of defending oneself, a hobby, and for some a way to feed their family. We shouldn’t want to ban all guns. That is not what most people want. But most people want to find some way to find a way to make it harder for people who shouldn’t have weapons to get them. Simply raising the age one can purchase certain weapons, limiting high capacity magazines and universal background checks. I would love to have waiting periods for buying more than one weapon but that is a tougher thing to get passed and may get too close to the 2nd amendment. Calls to repeal the Second Amendment, by the way, are non-starters. It is that kind of rhetoric that is as bad as those who think “cannot be infringed” means there are no rules. Both do not help the debate.
There is also a cultural issue in our country that can’t be denied. We fetishize guns and that has to change. Be it the way guns play a role in cultivating an image in parts of the entertainment industry, or those whose family holiday card includes everyone holding a rifle this is not healthy.
Little kids should not have to make a split second decision to Run, Hide, Fight. They shouldn’t have to think like a forward battalion in war zone deciding who will live and who will die. They shouldn’t have to know how to see a classmate so destroyed by bullets that even their parents can’t recognize them. We can work together to fix this. We can find a way.
