"When did it become your job to take a bullet?" I pleadingly question my fiance, as we stand in the shower, hot water running over us.
"Sweetie, I'm a solider, I'm not going to run," he says to me, as tears begin to well in my eyes.
My fiance and I both work in education. He works with disadvantaged and learning disabled youths, I work at a medical school. He's a veteran, and we're both fighters. Neither of us would run, and the issue is that if either of us got shot tomorrow we have three kids to take care of. Instead of enjoying the 15 minutes of steaming, kid-free, hot bliss that is our shower, we were discussing the most recent school shooting. Instead of taking care of our personal hygiene, we're trying to have a conversation about what would happen if an student in either of our schools went on a shooting spree. This is not the relaxing shower either us intended.
I have no solutions, only a pit of sadness where the divisive and stubborn few have spent their opinions on the matter. I watch my friends post articles and get into 100+ comment long debates on social media, all the while doing nothing to proactively prevent children from getting shot again.
Debating via social media solves nothing, and I know, of all the forums I could be saying this in, this is the most hypocritical. I'm not here to debate opinions. People are dead. It's time to change.
How this change becomes enacted is contentiously debated along multiple lines, across various political parties, and still- we have no answers. What I personally want to know is why, why do I have to look at my fiance and ask him not to take a bullet?
Asking teachers to take a bullet when we already ask them to stay before and after school, grade papers at home,and buy school supplies for their classrooms is not only over the line, it's absurd. If teachers wanted to become paramilitary, they would have signed up for that specific job and stayed within a military career. I can think of no teacher whom I've met in my personal or professional life who signed on to protect children over educate them.
When we host active shooter drills at my work place, we're taught to run, hide, and as a very last resort fight. It's standard stuff, but what isn't so standard is commonality of the drill. We're beginning to make school shootings as common place as tornado drills and fire drills. They're just another "safety precaution" to be taken, as if they were a common natural disaster. It's disgusting to think that we're now lumping school shootings in with unpreventable natural phenomena.
Shootings are entirely preventable. How to prevent them could be as simple as turning in all your guns and smelting the iron, or as complex as totally redoing the mental health system so that everyone has access to the care they need without cost to them. I believe the answer lays somewhere in the middle, but it does not start and end with teachers being asked to jump in front of shooters, nor by making school shootings out to be so common place that we have practice drills.
I have no power to sway congress, lobby, or change popular opinion on gun control. But I do have the power to think critically and use my vote where it will count in the coming elections. I have the power to let others know they have the same power. It's time to stop debating this issue and vote to make the changes we need. School shootings are not normal, and in a developed nation as advanced as our own, we shouldn't have to stand around fretting over who takes a bullet.
