Guns Are Not the Point

March 29, 2018

As my seven-year-old daughter and I walked up Columbus Avenue in Manhattan last Saturday to join the March for our Lives rally, the full impact of the crowd hit her.  It was a bit overwhelming, as she, like her mother, doesn't really like crowds.  She gripped my hand tighter and forged on, head down. 

I soon realized that heads-down might be the best way to go.  All around us there were children carrying signs with hand-drawn guns on them. I had only told my daughter that this march was about "keeping kids safe in school." I had not said that it was about stopping people from coming into her classroom and riddling her with bullets from a military style weapon.  And that is because my daughter is in first grade, and this would traumatize her.

And that is the point.  This is what the Parkland survivors have been trying to tell us.  Being the "mass shooting generation" is traumatizing, and anxiety provoking, and sick.

When the NRA lauds the school security officer who last week abruptly stopped a school shooting in Maryland as "a good guy with a gun," they are missing the point.  When our President wants to arm teachers, he is missing the point. And when former Senator Rick Santorum, a longtime family-first, pro-life advocate declared on CNN's Face the Nation yesterday that kids should take CPR classes to prepare for school shootings--well, he knocked the absurdity of this entire conversation out of the park.  

All of these stances take school shootings as a given--a necessary by-product of allowing grownups to have their toys.  And if that isn't anti-family and anti-life, then I don't know what is.

The point is that the very conversation we're engaged in as a nation is damaging our children.  Even the school drills meant to prepare them for a time of crisis are terrifying.  How is asking small children to crouch silently in the corner with their classmates as a "pretend shooter" rattles the doorknob from the other side reassuring?  Having children hide under desks many decades ago to prepare for the bomb that never came is different from preparing kids for the kind of shooting they see on the news each and every day.  We send our kids to school each day with that little voice in the back of their head that says, "Today could be the day a school shooter comes here."  

But fear not.  Our young people have gotten the message.  As Parkland survivor Cameron Kasky told the nation at the Washington, D.C. March for Our Lives event, "Don’t worry. We got this.”  Our children no longer expect us to help them.  Because we haven't.  The Parkland generation is determined to fix this problem themselves.

And I'm certain that they will-- by registering to vote in record numbers, making gun control an issue for voters, and voting themselves to oust NRA A-rated politicians.  I will follow that kind of leadership any day.

So are guns the point?  Yes, of course the guns are the point.  Assault weapons should be banned.  But the other point that too many of us have missed is that we have allowed the gun-culture warriors to frame the national conversation around the inevitability of gun violence (a "bad guy with a gun" has to attack before a "good guy with a gun" can save the day).  Even for kids who never experience a school shooting, the looming, daily threat of violence in their lives damages and traumatizes them.  We have to do better, and not give in to the cynical view that violence against our children is inevitable.