Take A Moment To Tell Your Child You Love Them
By: Brianna Valentin
“Why do so many kids keep dying?”
These words hit me like a strong gush of wind as they left my 8 year-old cousin’s mouth. He was twirling his spoon into his plate of rice, awaiting my response. I took a sip of my juice and just stared at him. I stared into his little brown beady eyes. Eyes that I prayed would never have to see the other end of a rifle.
These shootings are both a social and political disaster. A series of unfortunate of events that continue to unravel all too naturally across the land that is said to reek of freedom. A land where bullet inflicted bodies of children are stacked higher than the Trump Tower.
It’d be an understatement to say that I too didn’t even know what the hell was wrong with people. How is it that these people could just wake up one morning, and decide that everyone around them deserves to die. What in their twisted mind, encouraged them to get their hands on a weapon and play God?
How is it that we continue to allow guns to fall into the hands of monsters? People who kill with the intentions of causing pain, suffering and chaos in a world where there is so much of it already.
On May 4, in Dallas, Texas, President Donald Trump delivered a speech regarding the NRA (National Rifle Association). He made the statement, “Democrats and liberals in Congress want to disarm law-abiding Americans at the same time they’re releasing dangerous criminal aliens and savage gang members onto our streets”.
Comments like this are what have so many people, including myself, red-faced. The President continues to rant and spread the stigma, that it is the foreigners that we have to be afraid of. However, his xenophobic opinions begin to fade into nothing, as the monsters in America’s closet reveals itself. The white American male is slowly becoming the poster child for the school shooter, or any other type of shooting for that matter. In my opinion, like so many others, these dangerous white American men are the real terrorists. They are the ones that fill our country with gloom. They are the reasons why are flags are always at half mast.
The NRA is known for its solid opposition against assault weapon reform, as well as raising the age from 18 to 21 for buying these weapons. The NRA is also known for being closely knit with the President. Trump stated in an NRA conference in Atlanta, “ You came through for me and I am going to come through for you.”
Many around the nation are outraged with not only the President’s comments, but with the NRA’s ability to see the flaws within its own system. Its inability to acknowledge that guns are the main factor in the slayings of the students in these shootings. For the slayings of any individual in any shooting for that matter.
After the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, occurred on Valentine’s Day of this year, parents and students created a voice for the victims. Emma Gonzalez and David Hogg, survivors of the Parkland shooting, among many others, have created a world wide debate regarding gun reform policies.
On February 22nd of this year in Sunrise, Florida, a town hall meeting was held to address gun reform concerns. Gonzalez and Hogg, as well as many of their own surviving classmates, went head to head against Senator Marco Rubio and NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch.
Here, even parents of the victims said their piece.
A parent in particular that truly struck a cord with me, was Fred Guttenberg. His daughter, Jaime Guttenberg, as he describes it, was struck in her back while trying to escape a bullet infested hallway. He states, “Senator Rubio, my daughter, running down the hallway at Marjory Stoneman Douglas was shot in the back with an assault weapon. The weapon of choice. Okay? It’s too easy to get. It is a weapon of war. The fact that you can’t stand with everyone else in this building and say that…I’m sorry”.
Just like every single one these activists around the country.
I am appalled to say the least. I am angry and I am afraid.
I am scared of duffel bags. I am scared of white men in trench coats.
I dread the day when gunfire fills the air of my classroom, or at my sister’s gym, or my parents’ workplace.
If you were to ask me what can prevent school shootings, I’d say a a lot of things. I’d say that on a technical level, sure, put metal detectors at all the entrances of all the schools in our countries, sure, have a police officer outside of every door of every classroom. But that is not the case. In order for change to come, it is up to those who swing from the legislative and judicial branches of our government. After we have showered them with our concerns, they will either acknowledge the social disaster that is taking place or they will continue to fling their shit from their high elevated branches.
In Naomi Klein’s “How Power Profits from Disaster”, she states, how around every corner of any sort of disaster, there are vultures of the political system who are ready to profit. Ready to make a buck at the demise of other people.
For instance, with Trump’s hand firmly intertwined with the NRA’s, there is no winning for the victims of these shootings. Seeing that the NRA supported Trump during the election, he has committed his position as President to them.
As put by Vox writer Charlotte Hill, although the NRA may not have direct influence in how decisions are made, they are bale to manipulate the masses by feeding into a candidate’s agenda. Hill states, “The story of the NRA’s influence is, in large part, the story of how economic power buys political power in modern America.”
The record needs to be set: guns kill people. That’s it. Plain and simple. The victims were ordinary people, just like me and you. The day they died, they thought it would be like any other. Parents probably gave their kids a tiny peck on cheek before they hopped out and went on their marry way to school. Not knowing that this would be the last time seeing their child alive.
