Have you watched the body camera footage from the Metro Nashville Police Department showing raw video of this week’s school shooting in America?
Bodycam footage from the Covenant School shooting is posted online where viewers can watch, firsthand, the events that unfolded Monday during the mass murder of schoolchildren and staff at Covenant School in Nashville.
We live in a country full of freedoms – including the freedom to carry almost whatever gun you wish – and we live in a country with an overwhelming lack of common sense and guts to say: “Enough!”
In the video footage, three Metro Nashville Police are visible as they methodically work through the school, entering classrooms and en suite bathrooms, identifying themselves as they bravely and carefully hustle through the school.
Tiny classroom chairs, mini desks, bulletin boards, American flags, and crosses in the hallways (this is a private Christian school) are a horrific parody of childhood in this dark, macabre narrative all Americans are allowing to happen.
Why do we? What are we afraid of? Our worst fears are already playing out. Monday’s fatal school shooting in Nashville is the 19th one so far this year.
This time, three 9-year-olds, the principal, a school custodian, and a substitute teacher fell victim to our state-sanctioned gun violence. According to the Journal of American Medical Association JAMA Pediatrics, homicide is the leading cause of death for children in the U.S. According to CNN, that overall rate has increased an average of 4.3 percent each year since 2012.
Why do we keep letting this happen? I am not advocating for complete gun control. Hunt, keep a gun for your safety, but, in return, please speak up. Please. With your privilege of gun ownership, say: “No more AR-15s.”
AR-15s are the worst of the weapons – and the most destructive. They are the weapon of choice for school shooters. Amazingly, a federal assault weapons ban, enacted in 1994, was allowed to expire in 2004 when it came up for renewal.
Mass gun violence happens so frequently now in the U.S. that children and adults are caught in this nightmare more than once. Can you imagine? Scared college students at the recent Michigan State University shooting went to high school in Metamora, where they were frightened Oxford High School kids.
A woman on vacation in Nashville with her family survived a shooting at a Fourth of July parade in a Chicago suburb a few summers ago. She stopped at the school in Nashville to ask, “When will this stop?”
When will it stop? Nashville Police released that footage one day after the latest massacre. Why? Maybe to shake us up, to throw a glass of ice-cold water in our faces to get us to realize what we are allowing.
John Cooper, the Nashville mayor, said he was “overwhelmed at the thought of the loss of these families, of the future lost by these children and their families.”
It is unlikely that any gunsafety legislation will pass for two more years. That’s because Republicans have the majority in the U.S. House of Representatives and they say it won’t pass.
But maybe we can push back: Perhaps Republican, Democratic, and independent voters can finally tell lawmakers to stop the free-flow access to AR-15s. Regulate them. Take them away. Then there will be no more access to these weapons for violent people who turn up at schools, colleges, churches, movie theaters, and parades to threaten everyone there.
It is pretty simple: Become a single-issue voter.
Please don’t vote for anyone who won’t support gun-safety legislation, including banning AR-15s, for all our sakes.
But mainly for those tiny sakes we love.
About the author: Megan Giles Cooney is a writer and artist, who is a summer resident of Northport. She graduated from Denison University in Ohio and is the daughter of Bob Giles, a member of the Record-Eagle editorial board, and the late Dr. Nancy Giles. She worked in television news and for Daimler Chrysler earlier in her career.
