Monday’s gun murders at Michigan State University cut a bit too close to the bone for me.
My son was visiting campus a few hours before the shooting started. Friends’ kids who are students at MSU are shaken but OK. People I know who live on and near campus are rattled but safe. There but for the grace of God and all, but what about the three students with their futures stretching out before them, shot dead by a man apparently dealing with mental health issues? What about the other five students he shot who survived but are fighting for their lives?
For every person posting on social media today a thought and prayer in support of Michigan State University, I have a question: What will you do to keep our children safe?
When I worked at the local paper, I was attune to sirens and scanner chatter, and I feared an active shooter in one of our schools, something that felt like a distinct possibility after Columbine in 1999, the year my son was born.
These days, I work from home on the west side of Howell, close to the high school, and fire and sheriff’s departments, and every day that school is in session and emergency vehicles scream by, I pray: “Please, God, please: Don’t let it be a shooter at the school.”
We think we’re helping our kids stay safe when we teach them to “run, hide, fight,” but does that mean we consider ourselves bystanders in the violence? Do we believe active shooters are like tornados: inevitable and uncontrollable, striking at random, something we endure and survive?
It feels like such an unhealthy and unsustainable way to live, and yet, here we are.
So, when do we get angry enough, frightened enough, smart enough, brave enough to do something about it? When is it time for us to teach our kids that we value their lives enough to enact the barest of minimums — background checks, for instance — to ensure that they are safer?
This is no time for hand-wringing, thoughts and prayers, or accepting the inevitability of ever-increasing mass shootings because some of us believe the Second Amendment — crafted at a time when people had to load black powder into their muskets in order to get off a single shot before reloading — gives us carte blanche with firearms today.
This, dear reader, is the time to echo the call of the students who survived the Parkland mass shooting and cry “bullshit.”
To do nothing is to cede the future of our children to the violence that some want us to believe is inevitable. The Second Amendment was written in 1789, when people shot muskets and flintlock pistols, both of which held just a single round, and when the United States did not have a professional military.
The times, they have changed.
There are more guns in the United States than there are people. There is not a single industrialized country in the world that suffers the kind of gun violence we endure. Today is Feb. 14 — Valentine’s Day, and the 5th anniversary of the Parkland shootings — and we have had 67 mass shootings so far this year. That’s nearly 1-1/2 mass shootings EVERY SINGLE DAY. Firearms are the leading cause of death for children and teens in the U.S., surpassing car crashes, drug overdoses and cancer, according to research published in The New England Journal of Medicine.
If you’re OK with that, the next mass shooting is just around the corner, according to the current trajectory.
But if you want to do something about it?
Use your vote, the most powerful weapon of all. Use your vote to broom from power those politicians who don’t value the lives of our children enough to do something, anything.
I’m not asking for guns to be outlawed; I’m begging for some common sense legislation.
Don’t think your vote can make a difference? Look at what happened in Michigan when politicians tried to strip women of the right to choose, a right they’ve had for half a century. People voted, and now, Michigan, long under the thumb of Republicans, is governed entirely by Democrats for the first time in over four decades, and a woman’s right to choose is enshrined in the state’s constitution.
The majority of Michiganders supports a woman’s right to choose, as well as common sense gun reform. They support background checks and red flag laws. Why is it so hard to get those two simple things enacted?
Want to do something more meaningful than offering up thoughts and prayers? Are you ready to help stem the tide of endless mass shootings?
Vote.
Vote.
Vote.
Cast your ballot for politicians who support the bare minimum of common-sense reforms. Don’t vote for anyone who doesn’t support background checks. Don’t vote for politicians who don’t support red flag legislation, as well as funding for mental health programs.
Want to take it a step further? Don’t vote for politicians who glorify and normalize gun culture by posing with weapons in their campaign literature. Don’t vote for candidates who accept money from the NRA.
There are meaningful things we can do beyond thoughts and prayers.
Michigan’s former Senate Leader Mike Shirkey, R-Clarklake, said after four students were shot to death at Oxford High School that focusing on eliminating risks could mean that “we will … develop and evolve into a country we won’t recognize.”
If that means we won’t be suffering through 1-1/2 mass shootings a day, count me in.
