Schools are in session, so it’s time for a maladjusted classmate to shoot a bunch of his or her classmates. Shootings on school property are as common as pop quizzes. And there is nothing we can or will do about it.
“Here we go again,” my spoken reaction after hearing news of the school shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia. We’ve been expecting this and are presently waiting for another shooting (one happened yesterday) and another will probably happen next week, or maybe a couple of weeks from now. Killings are lining up like planes waiting to depart LAX. There will be more shootings because we live in a disturbed and sick society, and, of course, dead to rights, we are an unashamed gun culture. We have no remedies and no plans to address this self-inflicted horror. These shootings will continue because we value the Second Amendment above human life. One wonders if and when the shift in that value might change? What if we killed 8oo children a day? How about 1000 a day? At some point we may run out of children to kill, but certainly not guns with which to kill people. For every 100 citizens in our country there are 120 guns, the highest per capita gun ownership in the world. No other country is even close. https://www.statista.com/aboutus/our-research-commitment
Fear of being shot and killed is a stark anxiety to nearly everyone in America, especially those students in K-12 schools and in colleges and universities where developing brains gather. That’s where the young are clumped together and become easy to pick-off, something like shooting fish in a rain barrel. That’s where interpersonal conflicts and small humiliations turn into lethal remedies for the shooters and nightmares for the rest of us. And that’s where active shooter drills scar thousands of students for a lifetime of mental health damage and low-grade angst afflictions. But, hey, we don’t really care, do we?
If I were a parent of a school-age student today, I would consider alternatives to public schools (home schools, virtual schools, private schools, Waldorf schools, even unschooling) because the odds of physical and/or emotional harm is too large a risk in the daily scrum called public schooling. Though, frankly no school seems safe. Private schools, too, have had recent shootings. Tag me overprotective but opting to keep a child’s life protected from the dangers of our disturbed culture ought to be priority number one.
Though not in my lifetime, and probably not yours either, robust gun control laws are needed to allay the self-harm results of the Second Amendment. The 21st Amendment repealed the 18th Amendment (imposing prohibition), so it is theoretically possible to alter our sacrosanct Second Amendment for our own good.
The Second Amendment needs remodeling to suit the context in which we live, not the time when we traveled on horseback, and muskets and flintlock pistols were used to protect us from tyranny. An intelligent discussion is needed to assure the Second Amendment is updated and honored but changed to protect us all.