When I was a boy in Omaha, I had a gun.
It was black and plastic and made for shooting water. I kept it in a drawer in my bedroom because I wasn’t allowed to play with it. It looked too much like the real thing.
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Less than a thousand miles away, in the middle of the gun-loving state of Texas, a girl wasn’t allowed to play with her Nintendo Entertainment System’s signature accessory, meant for the game Duck Hunt: A gray plastic pistol. The girl’s father, a doctor, knew what a gun could do to a body.
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That was the ’80s. Today, kids’ guns are supposed to have an orange tip, indicating that they’re a toy, not real. That’s why I can walk into Target with my kids and find an entire aisle devoted to rifles, handguns and other forms of weaponry — euphemistically dubbed “blasters” — from Hasbro’s Nerf and other brands, each one carefully designed to make clear: These guns are for kids.
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April 20, 1999. In Columbine, just over 500 miles from where I lived, two teenagers kill 12 students and one teacher. I remember coming home and seeing the news on TV, then reading about it in Time magazine. I was a senior in high school. I didn’t think about it then, but surely my parents must have been thinking the same thing as every other parent in the country: One of those victims could have been our kid.
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2011. At Millard South High School, two miles from my childhood home, a student shoots two administrators, killing an assistant principal, before killing himself in the parking lot. Three years later, the district spent $80 million remodeling schools to improve security.
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December 2012. A Friday. Where I work, editors from around the country are in town for our holiday party. As they travel, the news breaks: Around 75 miles from where I live, a 20-year-old has shot and killed 20 kids and 6 staff members in Newtown, Connecticut. That night, no one feels like celebrating, but one editor in particular seems especially down. A father, he tells me that when you have kids, news like this hits you differently. A year and a half later, I become a father.
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Valentine’s Day, 2018: In Parkland, Florida, 1,300 miles away, a 19-year-old murders 14 students and three staff members at their high school. After the shooting, two students who survived the attack die by suicide.
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November 2021: In Oxford Township, Michigan, 1,400 miles away, a 15-year-old murders four students at his high school.
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December 2021: We spend part of the holidays in San Antonio, halfway between Austin and Uvalde. I can’t help but wonder about the kids we saw at the playgrounds, at parks, at the Pearl — were any of them from Uvalde? Where are they now?
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May 2022: An 18-year-old drives three hours to Buffalo and kills ten people, solely because of the color of their skin.
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May 2022: In Uvalde, three hours from where my children go to school, an 18-year old drives to a nearby elementary school, and murders 19 children and two teachers.
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You’ve made it this far, so please take the time and read the stories of those who were killed. Each one of these children reminds me of my own in some way. Their energy. Their love. Their curiosity. Their essential goodness. The blend of silliness and seriousness of kids that age. It’s not hard to imagine my own children in their place. “There’s no such thing as someone else’s war,” Jason Isbell sings. Well, there’s no such thing as someone else’s child, either.
And the teachers. Do you know a teacher? Have you spent any time in an elementary school classroom? Then you know how much a teacher cares, how hard they work, the joy and the dedication and the love, how each one would shield the children in their classroom from something like this. I can’t get over this: One of the murdered teachers has the same last name as one of my kids’ teacher.
And after you’ve read that, don’t turn away from what they experienced, either. Being locked in a classroom with a killer. The frantic calls to 911. One detail stands out to me: The girl who survived by wiping her dead classmate’s blood on her own body, and pretending to be dead herself for those long, agonizing minutes. She was wounded in more ways than one.
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The police response is now the subject of investigation, which is appropriate. But it’s worth remembering that we’re only having that conversation because a teenager was allowed — encouraged, really — to own a military rifle. And what is a gun but a machine designed for killing? And what is an AR-15 but a machine designed for killing rapidly and brutally?
And should we really expect a school district police force — a force primarily tasked with breaking up fights — to do battle with someone armed like an infantryman? And how did we get to a point where school districts need their own armed police?
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At times like this, cynicism is easy, maybe even warranted. You might say that nothing can be done to help. You might say we can vote, we can petition, we can organize, we can knock on doors and phone bank, we can march — but, based on the experience of the last 20-plus years, none of it will change anything. Even if we win, you might say, the courts will strike down any new laws, or time will render us complacent, and those laws will expire, as the previous assault weapons law did in 2004.
You might even say that America loves guns more than it loves its own children. And you wouldn’t be wrong.
And yet. What else can we do? If good people don’t speak up, nothing good will happen. If the majority of people who support common sense gun laws don’t vote, don’t organize, don’t spread the word, nothing will happen. If you give in to cynicism, if you declare defeat before giving it your all, nothing will happen — and that pessimism is exactly what the gun industry and its defenders want. They’re playing the long game. We need to do so, too.
Here, then, is a checklist of what I am doing, and I hope you’ll consider doing some of these things too:
-Voting for a new governor of Texas. Simply put, the current governor has had 12 years to take common-sense steps to stop this and hasn’t. Six mass shootings have happened on his watch. We need new leadership.
-Text-banking for that campaign, and like-minded campaigns for lieutenant governor and attorney general and elsewhere, in the hopes that other people will support the same candidate on election day.
-Supporting organizations like Everytown for Gun Safety, which are devoted to the long fight to protect children from gun violence.
-This Friday, I will be joining those around the country wearing orange — the color hunters wear to stand out in the woods and avoid getting shot — to show my support for new gun laws.
It might not make a difference. We might not win. We might win and still lose, for all the reasons above. But even if victory isn’t guaranteed, we owe it to ourselves and our children to do everything in our power to prevent more death.
It won’t bring these children and their loving teachers back, and it won’t be easy. But nothing would be as hard as going through this again, knowing we could have done more to stop it.
