Another school shooting. My heart sank when I heard the news.
When I became a mom, I didn’t expect to have such strong emotions for children everywhere. Pre-kids, I was just another young adult with not a lot of good feelings for small children. For some perspective, the mass shooting at Columbine High School happened when I was 19 years old. It is my first memory of a school shooting, and, though it embarrasses me, I admit that it didn’t affect me. Colorado was a world away and surely it wasn’t something to worry about since it would never happen again. Right? We learned everything we needed to know about gun violence in schools from that one incident, right? We’ll just tighten up gun control and everything will be fine. Right?
Oh, my teenage self was so naive.
I am on the other side of 35 now, and I have three kids…and gun violence in schools has increased to a level I cannot ignore anymore.
Second Amendment fanatics will tell you all day long that gun violence is not a gun problem, as though admitting it makes them culpable, as though admitting it will strip them of all of their rights on a slippery slope of gun legislation.
I’ve read the Second Amendment. There’s some delicate wording in there about a militia having a right to bear arms, but I don’t see anything about private citizens owning powerful weapons for their own personal use. Our forefathers could never have known what kind of weapons would be invented over the course of history, but I am confident they are screaming from their graves, “No, no, no! That’s not what we meant!”
I’ve real through hoards of opinions following this most recent school shooting, and my jaw is nearly permanently dropped. The truth is impossible to distinguish as broad generalizations spew violently from the mouths of gun advocates. Don’t tell me that guns save lives or that guns don’t kill, people do. Don’t tell me that loose gun laws work in other parts of the world. That’s a slap in the face to anyone suffering a loss from gun violence and it makes America look like a nation of poorly educated, backwoods idiots.
I’m not a gun expert. I don’t own a gun and don’t want to own a gun. My husband and I will defend our home with a golf club or die trying. As a child, I once saw a shot gun in a closet in my Grandma’s house and it scared me so much I refused to open that closet ever again. My uncle once let me hold his handgun and I nearly wet myself. My father didn’t hunt or own a gun. I have no healthy experiences with guns, only a gut instinct.
So why do I care so much about gun violence? I have children.
Shortly after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary school, my child started first grade in the classroom closest to the door at her school. I lived in constant fear of someone entering her school and taking lives in the first classroom they could find: hers. I couldn’t NOT think about it as we approached the school each and every day. I openly wept at work for those children in Newtown. It was so senseless, so utterly heartbreaking.
What is the solution?
Something has to give. There is no practical purpose for a private citizen to own a high powered weapon. There just isn’t. Get rid of them. They belong in police departments and the military. Relegate them to shooting ranges where they are shot for recreational use only, then locked up again at the range.
Keep your hunting rifles, keep your hand guns in the night stand, keep your concealed weapon permits, but I am begging that all high powered weapons be removed from the hands on civilians, for the sake of our children.
Without high powered weapons, the next time such a tragedy occurs as it has 142 times since the end of 2012, we can focus on the rest of the underlying problems: depression, drugs, bullying, and mental health disorders.
How many more times do our children need to die senselessly at the hands of a mentally unstable gunman in order to make a change? How long until the pro-gun crowd sees that the solution to gun violence is
not
more guns?
It’s an uphill battle. Pro-gun groups have strength in their numbers and seemingly every judge in America is A-OK with interpreting the Second Amendment to mean that all of us are part of the militia. But this emotional mama thinks the guns need to go. Few agree with me, but I know I’m not alone when I say something has
got
to give.
I’m saying it loud and clear now. Our kids deserve to be safe in school, protected from the enemy that walks among us. Gun control isn’t going to solve the whole problem, but it’s where we need to start. This is America and we are a civilized nation.
