We Need to Go Back to the Beginning

Of all the things that break my heart in this country - and there are many - our unwillingness to pass sane gun control legislation and keep our children safe at school is at the very top of the list. It is hard to describe how awful it is as a mother to get texts from your kids during lockdowns - a thing I have experienced with both of my children - and feel panicked and powerless and have nothing but the word please pumping through your veins. This is not a normal way to live.

It is not okay that our four-year-olds practice active shooter drills, that is insanity. It’s not okay at five, six, or sixteen. The older the kids get, the more aware they are that the adults running the show do not genuinely care about them. Do not dissuade yourself of this very obvious fact, because I promise you it is not lost on them. They might know you, specifically, care - my kids know how I vote and how I feel and that I would do anything to keep them safe - but they also know that a lot of adults in this country vote in a way that perpetuates a “thoughts and prayers” cycle of violence and tiny coffins and grief that never ends. You can’t say you care and do nothing. Kids are smarter than that and they are watching.

There’s an old African proverb that the late, great John Lewis used to quote:

When you pray, move your feet.

Leading up to the election I heard from women who said they were voting Republican because “abortion is murder.” Aside from the reality that states with restrictive abortion bans have a higher rate of infant and maternal mortality rates - if you care about babies dying, then I really hope you’re calling your senators and congresspeople, because if you aren’t you never cared about babies.

If you’re one of the people yelling about how this is a mental health issue, I agree and I really hope you’re making those calls, because your president and his administration have gutted funding for mental health support by 2 billion dollars over the last few months. One billion through SAMHSA, and another billion specifically allocated for schools to hire psychologists and other mental health experts through a gun violence bill signed by President Joe Biden in 2022.

The 2nd Amendment was written when we had muskets that took a full minute to reload - I’m sure you’ve seen the demos. Today we have military-style assault weapons that fire 83 rounds in that same minute. The Constitution was designed to change with the times - the Founding Fathers might have meant “all [straight, white] men [with means] are created equal,” but they had enough foresight to understand the world would change in ways they could not imagine, and that a document that was supposed to oversee the way our country was governed would need to change with it.

That’s why we’ve revised and repealed so many amendments, and why the 2Aers need to grasp that our children’s right to exist through the day far outweighs their right to bring their Call of Duty tough guy fantasies to life. We have more guns than people in this country. We have laws about how many inches have to be between the bars of a crib, or how much a child has to weigh to be out of a carseat, but you don’t want to regulate your precious guns? Also, you don’t care about the Constitution, you’ve made that very clear.

Aside from that, no one is coming for your hunting rifles or your handguns for personal safety, as long as you can prove you’re of sound mind. But we need to rethink what we’re doing. We license people to drive a car, because you can kill people when you get behind the wheel of a car, just like you can kill people when you pick up a gun.

I’m tired of seeing tiny children shot to pieces. I do not want to hear empty words. I do not want to see men and women who do not really care get rich while our children die. We do not have higher rates of mental illness in this country than anywhere else, what we have is unfettered access to guns and an unwillingness to put our children first. That’s the worst mental health problem we have, and the first one we need to address. We need to go back to the beginning and start again.

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