This year, while many Americans were getting ready to celebrate love on everyone’s favorite Hallmark holiday, Valentine’s Day, students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida were hiding under desks, barricading themselves in classrooms, and pleading for their lives. Normally, I’d avoid such a heavy topic on our generally more lighthearted blog, especially since I by no means have all of the answers to the complex issue that is mass shootings in modern America. But after listening to Emma Gonzalez speak (and crying) and watching students protest gun violence (and crying) and just witnessing the fallout of this latest American tragedy, I find myself with a lot to say.
First, I am so proud of the student body of Stoneman Douglas. I am proud of them for taking their grief, their anger, and their pain and trying to use it to affect positive change. Students have given speeches and interviews, have written for the New York Times, and have planned protests and meetings with lawmakers. These are kids. Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen year old kids. Most of them can’t even vote in the next election. But they are determined to use their sorrow and their experience to do everything they can to be the last mass shooting in America. This isn’t something any teenager should have to take on. This is something that parents, lawmakers, voters, adults should have protected these children from, but we have failed. All of us have failed. So instead of worrying about who they’re going to prom with, these students are worrying about whether their voices are enough to finally make lawmakers take mass shootings seriously. Students everywhere in American are wondering “Will I be next?”. Shame on America for allowing children to carry that burden and for doing absolutely nothing to even attempt to help lighten that load.
Second, shame on anyone whose first reaction to another mass shooting was “Don’t even think about taking away my guns!”. Shame on you for putting your own recreation above the lives of children. Especially when no one is suggesting that anyone take away all of your guns, unless of course you are mentally unstable. Then again, if your first reaction to the senseless deaths of 15 children and two adults is to protect your guns, maybe you are deranged. I don’t care which side of the gun debate you are on, if your first thought wasn’t that something needs to be done to stop this from happening again, you are a selfish, disgusting excuse for a human being. And woe to all of you who reacted this way, because these traumatized children have seen your responses. They know that you value shooting at things quickly for fun more than you value their young lives. They aren’t far from adulthood, and when a generation of children who grew up fearing for their lives on the way to school is in charge, I doubt any gun restrictions they pass will be as lenient as those that might pass today. If you choose to do nothing, your time is most certainly running out.
Third, shame on our Congressmen and women, and the State of Florida for choosing to pay for the funerals of innocents rather than enact any kind of change. No one should have had to pay for the funerals of 17 people, because the shooting at Pulse nightclub, less than two years ago and three hours away, should have prompted lawmakers to do something. But it didn’t. And neither did the Las Vegas shooting, less than six months ago. Lawmakers would rather please the NRA and use their money to pay for the funerals of shooting victims than do anything to protect innocent lives. If you don’t think that’s despicable, you are part of the problem.
Fourth, people on both sides of the issue are throwing around many ideas about how this can be resolved. This is a complex issue and no one solution is going to solve the whole problem, so here’s an idea: DO ALL OF THEM! Want to put metal detectors at the doors of every school? Great! Do it! Want to hire well-background checked military veterans to help protect our students while they learn? Great! Do it! Want to ban the sale of AR-15s and similar weapons, whose only real purpose is to kill? Great! Do that too! (And if you just got mad at me for saying that, frankly, go fuck yourself, because your right to shoot stuff real fast for kicks does not trump anyone’s right to keep on living). Want to increase waiting periods for the purchase of firearms? Awesome. It’s not going to kill anyone to wait a week for their new toy. Let’s do it. Want to increase background checks for firearm purchases and modify the types of mental illnesses and run-ins with the law that can keep you from owning a firearm? Cool. I’m down for that if it saves even one person from hiding in a closet and wondering whether they’re going to survive the school day.
And should we be inspecting how current laws are being enforced? You fucking bet. Improve the shit out of the background check system. Hold the FBI accountable for not reporting disturbed individuals like Devin Kelley (the Texas church shooter) or Nikolas Cruz. But also realize that our laws have huge holes in them. Omar Mateen (the Pulse Orlando shooter) was on a terror watch list which does not prevent you from buying a gun. I’ll repeat that. Our current laws don’t prevent suspected terrorists who are being watched by the FBI from buying semi-automatic weapons. So maybe they need a little revamping, yes? And before anybody says, “Well in a perfect world we would do all of that, but how are we going to pay for it all?”, here’s your answer: Just call it defense spending. The US spends more on defense than the next eight countries COMBINED. We spend more than FIFTY PERCENT of our government’s entire budget on “defense.” Every. Single. Year. The last time I checked, the whole point of defense spending was to protect our country from threats foreign and domestic. Does anybody see a bigger domestic threat? I’m not even sure I see a bigger foreign threat! Mass shootings are the single most important thing we have the power to protect our children and our citizens from, so I think our gigantic ($600 billion+) defense budget can help fund metal detectors for our already under-funded schools, and armed guards to protect our children, AND the costs associated with better mental healthcare to keep people from spiraling this far out of control, and the costs associated with better background checks and longer waiting periods, and anything else we can think of to better protect our citizens from mentally unstable citizens with murder on their mind. If we have to spend billions on ten solutions to stop this, and any of them work, it will be worth every penny.
Fifth, let me put down just one idea I’ve heard being thrown around. Stop suggesting that we arm every single teacher. There are three reasons this is a stupid idea. First, teachers have the same rights that you have. They have the right to bear arms or not. Some teachers don’t want to have a Glock in their desk. That is a huge responsibility. They shouldn’t have to be the one to decide whether one of their own students is enough of a danger to pull out a pistol and end his life. That’s not their job. Second, in a classroom of 30+ kids, you expect a teacher to keep a gun somewhere convenient enough to reach at a moment’s notice in an emergency, but safe enough that no kids will accidentally or intentionally be able to access it and cause harm to anyone else? Good fucking luck with that. Third, teachers are still just people. They are not saints, and though it feels like many of them are, there are always some bad apples. There are teachers that sleep with their students and think that’s okay. There are certainly some teachers out there that are not mentally stable enough to be trusted with a gun in a room full of children. So no, don’t arm every teacher, you freaking dingbats. It sort of defeats the purpose of the idea of background checks for gun owners if you just force every teacher to have a gun.
Last, show a little compassion, people. Hundreds of your fellow Americans have died in mass shootings just in the past few years. Is standing there screaming “ban guns” or “don’t take my guns” really the best thing you can think of to do to honor the dead? What if instead of that, you actually listened to the solutions presented by the victims themselves? What if we allowed the CDC to even study gun violence at all, so we might at least understand the root causes of this problem to the fullest extent possible? What if we acted like each other’s lives actually mattered, and mattered more than our own personal comfort or opinions? What if we considered the idea that our preferred solution might not be the right one, or even the only one? We each need to be part of the solution, because no one knows who could be the next victim.