Please, America. Where are we going with gun violence against children in what should be a designated safe place: school?
Will this detail from the latest school shooting in Wisconsin force you to pay attention to the trauma forced on all our children; a second-grade teacher called the police to report the active shooter at the Abundant Life Christian School in Madison.
Second grade, in the windup to Christmas winter break, should be full of joy and anticipation of fun days ahead, certainly not for processing mortal fear.
Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes said originally police mistakenly reported the 911 call came from a second grader, who would be no older than 7- or 8-years-old. That kids so young are confronted by an active shooter is beyond the script of the American Dream.
According to the K-12 School Shooting Database (yes, unfortunately, there is one), there have been 323 school shootings in the U.S. this year. That’s almost one a day. Let that sink in for a moment.
I am neutral on registered guns for hunting and self-protection. I am forcefully against the normalization of guns and gun violence anywhere near young people until they reach the age of adulthood.
Dec. 14 was the 12th anniversary of the school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, when an actor of terror killed 20 first-graders and six educators. Sandy Hook first-graders from 2012 are now almost high school graduates.
It is a rotten shame on us that the unbelievable has happened repeatedly in schools since then. Parkland, Florida, and Uvalde, Texas, spotlight these utter tragedies. In those two massacres by angry, sick teens, more innocent teenagers and second-graders lost their lives.
Remember Oxford High School in Michigan? That was the scene of the Nov. 30, 2021, shooting where four bright high schoolers were killed by another student three years ago. At least prosecutors in Michigan had the guts to charge and a jury to convict the parents who gave their 15-year-old son a semi-automatic handgun as an early Christmas gift.
The parents of the Madison shooter, a 15-year-old daughter who also took her own life, are evidently cooperating with police. But a review of the shooter’s motives and actions doesn’t really do anyone any good at this point. More kids and a teacher are dead at school.
Recent words spoken by Sandy Hook survivors stuck with me. One young woman told ABC News she went to Washington to lobby for gun control, facing the influential House Judiciary Committee. “People that have the power to make a change should do it,” she said, “instead of the 17- or 18-year-olds trying to do their work for them.”
Ending gun violence in schools is not an issue of naive, young people who want abstract change that older people don’t understand.
This issue is a matter of life or death, and it is sickening that America won’t get a handle on an absolutely urgent problem: reasonable gun control. Where is the middle ground?
Let that be on our minds as we make our New Year resolutions and try to commit to fixing an epic generational failing on the part of us adults toward our nation’s children.
