Enough Already, America

This map shows every school shooting since Sandy Hook. Shootings at K-12 schools in red, at colleges/universities in purple. (Everytown for Gun Safety/Mark Gongloff, via Vox.xom)

Dear America: Wake the hell up.

I sit here at my desk after school, another school shooting scrolling across the newsfeed of CNN. Another instance which, as a teacher, makes me wonder if we — my students, my school, my co-workers — could be next. It’s enough already.

Stop making those absolutely false claims that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”, and “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun, is a good guy with a gun.” Those phrases are trite crap, and they perpetuate the seemingly never ending gun violence which is being perpetrated in our country. Numbers don’t lie; Countries with gun control simply do not face the same issues with gun deaths that we face in this country. Don’t try and pretend otherwise; the spinning of numbers is ridiculous. It is time we wake up, and we GET RID OF GUNS.

We don’t need more guns. We don’t need guns at all. Go ahead, attack me, flame me — I am calling those who think that we need to protect an individual’s right to bear arms ignorant and scared. Because if you believe that, you are. How is that right greater than the right for a child to live?

I am scared. I am scared of walking into my school one day, and having to lock my students into my classroom and cower in a corner with fear about what might be happening outside of the door. I am afraid that I am going to have to make the choice to put myself between my students, and a gun. I am scared that my daughter isn’t safe when she goes to school this coming September and that someone will enter what should be a safe place, and hurt her.

I am scared that people value their ridiculous “right” to own a gun more than the lives of the children who are senselessly killed by gun violence day after day in this country. I am scared that our nation is so selfish that we have chosen to give up our children’s safety for the ability to carry weapons that have no purpose other than to hurt other people.

I am scared. And enough is enough. Not one more.

Guns aren’t worth lives.

Enough.

Related post: Stop. Drop. And Play Dead.