Guns or Kids: The Choice is Yours

EDITOR’S NOTE- My opinion entirely.
Every time I hear about a school shooting, the life I’ve lived with my baby sister flashes before my eyes. I cannot shake the image of hugging her limp, lifeless, unrecognizable body to mine, wishing there was something I could do, changes I could make to prevent outcomes like these. But there is essentially nothing I can do when the only people who have the power to make change feel no urgency to do so. Despite the desperate pleas of mothers whose children have been violently obliterated by both gunshots and the lack of policies to protect them from the bullet, policy-makers send nothing but their “thoughts and prayers” to victims as though that makes a difference and will fill the child-sized holes in their constituents’ hearts.
“Thoughts and prayers” do not shield a five-year-old child from an AK-47; their teachers do. Their desks, books, closet doors, and friends do.
Instead of finger-painting or learning the alphabet, kindergarteners are taught how to play dead in their classrooms. A fourth-grader in the Uvalde school shooting in Texas smeared her dead eleven-year-old friend’s blood on her, so the shooter thought she, too, was dead. If a person feels uncomfortable reading that fact, they should ask themselves how distraught the baby girl who had to live through and tell that story must be. What is more gruesome, the act of describing, or the act itself? There is something to be said about the parents of the shooter, and the shooter is the one to pull the trigger and shoot, but how many times has our system failed him for it to get to this point? Where were the interventions and safeguards for people struggling with mental health or stuck in abusive homes? Where was the interference from outside society, from teachers who are mandated reporters, from administrators who saw the signs in behavior, and from counselors who don’t report their clients? Where are the preventative measures?
To make no effort to limit the effect of children being ripped away from their families weekly in the most gruesome way possible is one thing; to have absolutely no inhibitory regulations is moronic. And as a lawmaker or politician, to be “surprised” when these children are taken is insulting.
These obscenities will continue to be inevitable until the human beings’ lives are valued over a hateful person’s virtually unrestricted freedom to bear arms. To ban guns is unrealistic; to require stricter background checks and mental health evaluations, to need permits to own guns, to have a mandatory waiting period before the purchase of a firearm, to have classes about gun safety, requiring proper storage, but most importantly making sure the other people living in the house with the gun are also safe people, is not.
It won’t stop shootings, but it will work to prevent them- and it’s certainly more than the safeguards implemented now. Dangerous people need to be addressed by our system sooner than their breaking point when they steal our world’s babies without remorse. To understand the discrepancies in our institutions and stay silent is to be complicit in the genocide of our youth- what makes us any better than the person pulling the trigger, then?