ETA: On 12/15, a New York Times article gave this information on children and gun deaths in the U.S.: “Guns are now the No. 1 cause of deaths among American children and teens, ahead of car crashes, other injuries and congenital disease…. The U.S. accounts for 97 percent of gun-related child deaths among similarly large and wealthy countries, despite making up just 46 percent of this group’s overall population…. The U.S. has more guns than people…”
Before Thanksgiving, I mentioned a project I was doing with the blog that would be of little interest to anyone else, but I was motivated by several reasons.
I believe I was a sophomore in college when I had to choose from suggested topics to research and write a persuasive paper for a speech class (I didn’t have to give a speech or participate in a debate; this was strictly a writing assignment). When I browsed the choices, the one that caught my eye was gun control: pro or con.
Two things interested me. First, my father was retired military. Specifically, the Army, and more specifically, the infantry. I knew he had to be proficient in weaponry (years later, I’d find papers that showed some of the weapons and tanks on which he’d been trained). Yet we never had a weapon in our home.
Further, I understood the culture he grew up in. As a boy and adolescent, he would have hunted. Whether specifically for food or for the camaraderie and skill of the activity, any fowl or other animal killed would have been used for food. Yet I couldn’t remember him talking about hunting, nor do I remember any occasion when he went hunting alone or with other hunters.
My high school boyfriend, who became my first husband, was also a hunter. Again, when he and our friends hunted, they hunted game for food. After we married and had our first post-college home, there were hunting weapons in our house. I never went near them, and he was meticulous about how he stored them.
All that in mind, I wasn’t sure why guns needed to be controlled. Did my father have a reason for not wanting them in our home? This was long before PTSD related to military service was a commonly known and discussed topic. I’d heard of “battle fatigue” and “shell shock,” but I didn’t know if those applied to my father. Did other people keep weapons in their homes? People who weren’t hunters? I had no idea. No one ever showed me any.
Since my ignorance seemed so vast, I picked that topic. I was diligent with my research, and I was stunned by the kinds of statistics and the number of tragic stories I read. Mass shootings were an anomaly back then, but the number of accidents in the home that killed children and other family members was numbing. The number of suicides in which a gun was used, the number of guns used in domestic violence, the crimes that turned deadly because of guns… All that juxtaposed against the Second Amendment rights that people cited as their right to “bear arms,” and our history of wars against U.S. citizens (1860s) and indigenous peoples (encompassing our expansion beyond the lakes, the prairies, the mountains that divided us from the Pacific Ocean).
When I wrote my paper, I chose to take the position of pro gun control. My position wasn’t that people shouldn’t have guns or should give up their guns. I chose instead education, training, registration, systems that I thought would protect, in particular, children from gun deaths, accidental deaths–because in that time, the idea of deliberately murdering school children was unthinkable. I read, studied, and interviewed to find compromise between gun safety and liberty.
I got an A on my project, and I got a conference with my professor, who told me I had one of the best researched, most thoughtful and thorough arguments on the topic he’d ever read.
In the years after that, I came to know people whose lives were impacted forever by guns, as was my own. In a broader sense, assassination attempts on Presidents Ford and Reagan were chilling reminders of the deaths of John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X. The murder of John Lennon kept mental health and gun violence part of the pubic debate.
But nothing in my research, and nothing in the world I grew up in, could have led me to predict that military weapons, weapons of war, would ever become common in police departments, first through SWAT teams, and later, with access to decommissioned military weapons, not quite as regulated. Nor would I have thought that private citizens would ever own weapons that have ONE purpose, a purpose that has nothing to do with protecting one’s home and family or with hunting. That purpose is murdering as many people as lethally and efficiently as possible.
I’ve only become more certain that with gun ownership should come gun responsibility, and once again, that leads back to training, education, registration, as well as things like waiting periods, age restrictions, and background checks. In jobs I’ve had that had nothing to do with weapons, I’ve had to be registered, fingerprinted, and provide proof of residency and a criminal-free record. We all have to provide proof of insurance, license, and ownership for many things… but not weapons. It makes no sense to me.
Now we have this myth of “good guys” with visible guns patrolling public streets, eating in public restaurants, standing in front of public buildings. They dress like military. They are armed like military. They are not military. They are not National Guard. They have to provide no proof of training or mental competency to be in public with weapons of war. I have no interest in being where they are because this seems insanely unsafe to me.
Gun violence is at the worst it’s been during my lifetime. I haven’t forgotten the things I learned. I haven’t forgotten interviewing responsible gun owners. I haven’t forgotten that my father, trained for the wars he was part of, left military weapons with the military.
Ten years. It’s been ten years today since twenty children and six staff members were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in the village of Sandy Hook located in Newtown, Connecticut. We can’t say things have gotten better, only worse in these ten years.
.
The names below, of those killed, are not in the same order as the photos above.
Allison Wyatt, 6
Ana Marquez-Greene, 6
Anne Marie Murphy, 52 (Teacher)
Avielle Richman, 6
Benjamin Wheeler, 6
Caroline Previdi, 6
Catherine Hubbard, 6
Charlotte Bacon, 6
Chase Kowalski, 7
Daniel Barden, 7
Dawn Lafferty Hochsprung, 47 (Principal)
Dylan Hockley, 6
Emilie Parker, 6
Grace McDonnell, 7
Jack Pinto, 6
James Mattioli, 6
Jesse Lewis, 6
Jessica Rekos, 6
Josephine Gay, 7
Lauren Rousseau, 30 (Teacher)
Madeleine Hsu, 6
Mary Sherlach, 56 (Psychologist)
Noah Pozner, 6
Olivia Engel, 6
Rachel D’Avino, 29, (Therapist)
Victoria Soto, 27 (Teacher)
What I learned with my work in HIV/AIDS awareness and the NAMES Project is that names matter. Names remind us of the humanity of lives lost. My project I mentioned has been to research the eighteen years I’ve kept this blog, including the first on LiveJournal, find the victims of mass gun violence during my blog’s duration, and publish their names. It’s a daunting project, and I’ve barely begun to compile them all. I began with school shootings, moved to shootings at places of worship, and am now adding shootings at workplaces and commercial sites (e.g., grocery stores, malls) as well as those designated as domestic terrorism. As I find older posts on related subjects, I’m adding the tag “gun-reform” to them as I am to all new posts. As I find more details about incidents I’ve already recorded, I’m adding those. I haven’t provided names of the shooters, whether or not they died during the incidents.
I’m doing this because these deaths matter. These deaths break families’ and communities’ hearts. These deaths tear at the fabric of who we are and who we should be as citizens and neighbors. These deaths take deadly aim at the foundation of our country.
We are problem solvers. We are innovative. We are not evil. We can do better. We must do better.
