We wake up in the morning, follow our daily routines, and leave our homes for school or work. No one wakes up with the realization that this day could possibly be their last.
No parents would allow their children to attend school if they knew there was even a possibility that they could be hurt. It will never become a nuisance to speak up or defend “life,” but there is a striking moment of realization that the people in power are choosing not to protect us.
April 20th marked the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre. Two Colorado students (armed with four knives, two shotguns, and 99 explosives, amongst other weaponry) killed thirteen faculty and fellow students, then themselves. On December 14, 2012, a gunman opened fire at Sandy Hook Elementary School taking the lives of twenty children and six adults. In 2018 alone, there have been seventeen recorded school shootings.
On January 20th in North Carolina a Winston Salem State University football player, Najee Ali Baker, was shot to death at a party on the campus of Wake Forest University. This was the first reported school shooting of 2018. CNN reported on a March 20th shooting in Lexington Park, Maryland where an “armed student shot two others at Great Mills High School before a school resource officer fired a round at the shooter and the shooter died.” Chris Wilson in his Time article “This Chart Shows the Number of School Shooting Victims Since Sandy Hook” wrote that “there have been 290 recorded school shootings since Sandy Hook until now.”
People of all ages are learning to fear for not only their own lives, but for the lives of their mothers, their fathers, their sons, and their daughters. We know that life is naturally short and our fates are unavoidable. We cannot prolong the outcome because we cannot control how this happens. However, when that life is taken from us unnaturally by someone else’s judgment, this is an issue. Everyone says that the children are the future and over the past five years, we have lost too many.
After each and every one of these disasters, there have been debates upon debates over our gun control laws. Today, we debate the same issue, we know the solution, but refuse to make it happen.
When will we find peace of mind? Will children ever get the chance to be children again? Our lives have been corrupted and now more than ever we need structure, we need a system of enforcement that we can trust to protect our children.
How will we ever have a secure future where we can trust our youth will be protected if they are being gunned down every other week by their own peers?
