I was born in 1999. I was just under 2 years old when 9/11 happened, making it one of my earliest (and most traumatic) memories. For practically my entire life, I've grown up hearing about war, gun violence, and acts of terrorism in the United States. When Osama bin Laden was killed, we talked about it the very next day in my fifth-grade history class. The first mass school shooting I can remember hearing about is Sandy Hook.
I was at my friend's house in the seventh grade and her mom was watching it on the news and I remember thinking, "How could someone do something like this? How was someone even able to do this?" I also remember thinking that something like that could never happen near me, that eventually it would stop happening at all. The older I get, the more I realize how wrong I really was.
Because it kept happening, all over the country, and not just in schools. In movie theaters. In nightclubs. At concerts.
As these shootings became more frequent, we started being taught how to prepare for them in schools. Instead of just having fire drills and tornado drills, we started having mass shooting drills too.
We would practice hiding in our classrooms, we would learn the fastest routes out of the building through the doors as well as how to get out windows. We were given "tricks" for survival, like playing dead. We became experts at how not to get shot at school. But no one ever really talks about how that might have affected us.
We don't talk about how we're more prepared to escape a mass shooting situation than we are to file taxes, and how sometimes it feels very likely that the former could stop us from ever even getting to the latter.
We don't talk about that momentary fear we feel when we see someone in a school building or out in public that looks suspicious, even when they're doing nothing wrong. We don't talk about the reality that no matter where we go, or when we go, or who we're with, there's always a lingering note of fear that something might go wrong. That this might be the day it does happen near us, to us.
Because the reality is, there have been more people killed in mass shootings in 2018 than there have been military-related deaths. It seems that there are more regulations on what teenage girls can wear to class than there are on guns. In some states, it easier to purchase a firearm at a gun show than it is to get a job. And more than 80% of guns used in a mass shooting have been purchased legally.
I'm not saying that we should outlaw guns altogether; that would never work, and would probably cause more of an uprising than anything else. I'm simply saying that it should be harder to purchase a gun. I'm saying civilians shouldn't be able to easily access military grade weapons, if at all.
And I'm saying that we, as a country, should spend less time arguing over which political party is correct, and more time fighting for the lives of our children. Do we really care more about which party someone associates themselves with than we do about keeping our children safe?
Because it isn't safe to go to school. It isn't safe to go to the mall. It isn't safe to go to the movies, or a concert, or a dance club, or even church. And that simply isn't fair.
