School Shootings
Guns don't kill people, but American ignorance does.
I never thought I’d have to point this out, but there’s no silver lining to a school shooting. Don’t try to find one. It’s just not there.
I had the awkward experience of meeting a woman recently who insisted there was—referencing the noble sacrifices of teachers who throw themselves between the gun barrel and their students. Such poetry, such beauty. It turns out that real-life superheroes do exist! (She’s an aspiring writer, obviously.)
Setting aside my knee-jerk reaction, which is to laugh mockingly and call her a simp, I imagine this woman has never lost a loved one to gun violence. (I, on the other hand, have lost at least two former students to the gun barrel, and there definitely wasn’t any fucking silver lining there.) I imagine that she has a Hollywood-esque portrait in mind of what a school shooting looks like—it’s easier to romanticize a serious matter than approach it with a clear head.
As a former teacher, I can promise you that no teacher ever signs up to take a bullet—or to throw a chair at the worst student in the school to protect her class (even though the latter sounds like fun if taken out of context). Educators aren’t Secret Service agents, and their salary in no way reflects that kind of responsibility. I would trade every gun-lobby puppet politician for the lives of the two teachers who were murdered at Apalachee High School in Georgia earlier this month.
That horrible and preventable massacre was only one of about 50 school shootings so far in 2024.) It’s despicable that our government—brought to you by Smith and Wesson—puts innocent children, teachers, and others in this position. And they do it shamelessly. They’ve somehow accepted that children being massacred in school is an immutable fact of life. The next time I hear “thoughts and prayers,” I’m going to wish I had a gun.
But before conservatives reading this cry foul, know that I agree that the shooter’s parents should be held responsible. If you’re too stupid to keep your crazy nutjob son (it’s almost never a daughter) far away from a gun, you’re too stupid to be allowed to exist in the world without supervision. Personal responsibility matters.
The pro-gun side will talk about mental illness—but the irony is they are the ones who suffer from it the most. They think if they let down their guard for a minute, some sinister stranger (likely dark-skinned—due to decades of racist propaganda) will break into their house and do God-knows-what to their spouses and children. They also think that they’ll be able to stop this—often with minimal training and even less common sense.
Paranoia makes them more afraid of someone taking their precious guns away than someone using those guns to kill innocent people—they don’t give two shits about the latter. Rep. Steve Scalise doubled down on Second Amendment bullshit after he was shot and nearly killed at a congressional baseball game (which sounds boring, but I wouldn’t go so far as to try to kill the players).
Maybe these Second Amendment armchair warriors have a point. Maybe we all should just tool up for better protection. If everyone has a gun, then no one has a gun. We’ll all be equally threatening. Brilliant idea. Why didn’t I think of that? Let mothers keep machine guns in their babies’ strollers and old ladies keep pistols tucked under their perms or wigs—you never know when you’ll need one (at least once in a lifetime).
Of course, the “good guys” with guns just have to hope the “bad guys” have smaller guns and less ammo. Otherwise, we’re still screwed. Ain’t that right, Wayne LaPierre? (Who I can only assume left France because there weren’t enough guns.)
Too many Americans are dangerously ignorant and negligent, and this will destroy us all unless cooler heads—and cooler gun barrels—prevail.