Gun Violence and Me (and You, Too)

As the saying goes, we don’t fully understand something until it happens to us.

I have been an advocate for gun control for almost my entire life. Yet last weekend, the urgency of stopping the gun epidemic in the United States hit home.

“We love you. Pray for us. There’s a shooter in the building.”

That was the text I received from my in-laws as they hid from an active shooter in their church in Houston, Texas. It’s the text that we hear about often on the news: The “goodbye text.” The next half an hour felt like it lasted years, we we waited in fearful anticipation to see if they would make it out of the building. At one point, my father-in-law made it out of the building, but my mother-in-law was still unaccounted for.

Luckily, they both survived the shooting. At that point, the terror I felt turned to anger.

Anger because the shooter would have not been able to legally buy an AR-15 had Texas passed common sense Red Flag laws. The shooter had multiple previous arrests and was diagnosed with a mental illness. Anger because politicians and police in Houston used this event to push a pro-police agenda rather than addressing the gun epidemic in any way. Angry because while my family survived this time, the state of gun violence in American means that no one is truly safe.

By writing this post, I’m not looking for sympathy, I’m looking for action.

If you’re someone who hasn’t spoken up on this issue because it hasn’t impacted you personally yet, you can’t afford to wait that long.

As an educator, I think daily about the reality of gun violence in this country. Children are traumatized in significant ways by this epidemic. The most obvious trauma is on those children who live through such horrific events. Yet we also traumatize children who go through active shooter drills, not knowing if their life is in danger or not. How can we accept the wager that traumatizing children through these drills is an effective counter to mass shootings?

You might be wondering, how is this related to education? The reality is that our systems of education are deeply tied to other social, political, and cultural systems. We cannot have a meaningful conversation about humanizing education without changing political systems that allow our children to killed and traumatized. This does not mean hyper-policing schools or arming teachers; it means, at a bare minimum, common sense gun reform and a cultural shift in American life. No one’s freedom to own a gun which is designed to mass slaughter other people should trump another person’s right to live.

When I was in high school, the Sandy Hook shooting shook my community because we lived close by. There was a rallying cry at the time to prevent these types of shootings. It felt both sad yet hopeful that, finally, some change would be made.

How has this issue not gotten better? How are we still living in a country where we accept mass shootings as a daily reality?

To get involved, check out organizations such as March for Our Lives and Everytown. Call your representatives. While we can’t solve the problem alone, we can each play a critical part.