I grew up naive towards the kind of violence typical in mass shootings or school shootings. Unlike most of the current world and most of the world’s history, we live in a country that has the privilege of being mostly peaceful. In fact most of the globe is much more violent than the United States, but we don’t hear about it.
I experienced that kind of day-to-day violence during my time in the Army, in countries overseas. When I was young and before I took the oath to defend our nation, my parents attempted to shield me from that kind of awareness for as long as they could. I remember eventually getting to watch horror movies, war movies, and read about different battles throughout history, but that kind of violence had always been distant physically and or historically. That is until 1994 when a young man named Clay Shrout decided to murder his family and take that threat of violence to his high school which was located less than ten miles from my house.
I was in high school at the time and I remember speaking with my friends about it in the days that followed. We had friends that went to school there and we were all speculating about Clay’s state of mind. How could anyone do something like that? Why would he murder his family? Why would he take a high school hostage? What was he thinking? Was there any rational thought in his head? How could this happen, much less happen here?
Despite being mostly sheltered from human violence as a child, I had been around firearms my entire life. My family were not avid hunters, but as children, my siblings and I were taught how to handle guns. We were taught to have a reverence for a potentially deadly tool. Dad had a revolver next to his bed. There were shotguns and rifles in his closet. At the time I innocently thought everyone grew up like me: A car in the driveway, milk in the fridge, a phone on the wall, and . . . firearms in closets.
I remember an incident when I was about ten years old that broadened my world perspective. My uncle brought to our house two of his friends who were visiting from Japan. Coincidentally my dad, little brother, and I had been target shooting earlier with our .22 rifles. The rifles were on the living room table, mostly assembled after cleaning them. The look of terror on our foreign guests’ faces was a complete surprise to me. They had never seen a real “gun” in person.
In hindsight, the next 15 minutes were entertaining. They hardly spoke English and I don’t know Japanese, so we mostly pantomimed. My uncle is fluent in Japanese, and he attempted to translate our instructions: “trigger safety,” “muzzle awareness,” “how to load,” and “how to aim.” Whereas it was natural for me at ten years of age to pick up a rifle and immediately find the pistol grip, feel for the safety, ensure my trigger finger stayed out of the trigger well, and maintain muzzle awareness, the young Japanese gentlemen appeared clumsy and frightened just being in the same room with the rifles. I was equally bewildered to find out that in their country, “no one” was allowed to possess firearms. At the time, I remember thinking it’d be like finding out a country doesn’t allow their citizens to own dogs.
The USA was born from people owning weapons of war. We threw off a tyrannical king and became citizens with weapons of war. We are not just “allowed to own” firearms, we have built-in rights to possess them. The intention of our founding fathers was to ensure our government doesn’t become all-powerful. The government is supposed to fear the people so we don’t have a king or like-ruler that makes decisions for us. The government’s accountability to the people is enacted by more than just elections, it is also the impending doom should the armed citizenry become aware of a growing dictatorship or oligarch. There are elected officials who use every opportunity to push an agenda to end the power our citizens possess over our government. They call for an environment that would require a police-state to function.
When I was a police officer we practiced responding to school shootings. I was also certified to train different age-appropriate versions of school shooting responses to schools in our city. It was amazing to see how even the youngest children responded to the training with enthusiasm and learned lifesaving practices. If treated like a tornado drill or fire drill, people can be prepared without all the drama that seems to be injected into the national zeitgeist surrounding guns.
There are loud voices decrying “gun violence” and proposing “common sense gun control” (a gun cannot be violent because that inaccurately gives an inanimate object a will). There is no such thing as “common sense gun control.”
First, even if our government legislated away our basic right to self-defense, there is no practical way to accomplish gun control. Even if we could snap our fingers and have laws like Japan’s that criminalize citizens possessing firearms, it would take multiple generations to confiscate those firearms and wouldn’t be successful. We must remember that our country’s default state is ownership of weapons of war. If laws were passed that took away firearms, then, only those who know how to break the law would be in possession of firearms. That would embolden crooks, not make the country safer. There is no practical way to enact “common sense gun control.” The processes required to attempt such laws would be too burdensome and completely ineffective.
Violent people would still be able to possess firearms and harm others, but unchecked by peace-loving armed people.
Another misnomer propagated by the loud emotional voices is that there was a time when gun ownership was the exception. That something changed and suddenly people were armed and there was a subsequent increase in violence. Gun ownership hasn’t increased, but mental illness has. While this is a correlation, the number of school shootings/mass shootings have increased almost at the same pace as mental health crises. Young people feeling hopeless, who don’t have a solid identity of self. In most cases, the person who decides to enact harm on others was looking for some kind of notoriety or feeling of purpose. These are mental health issues.
I was blessed to have both parents raise me and my siblings and I had a lot of support while attempting to navigate my teenage years. I was raised to respect human life and even at my darkest hours, I understood that I have value. I knew that my family and community valued me. I was loved.
It seems to me that helping people see the value of human life rather than enacting ever more government control is a much more attainable goal. Firearms have and will be a constant in the United States, they have been here since before day one and are a given. What we seem to be facing now isn’t a rash of guns attempting violence, rather; we are seeing people attempting to find some importance in highly inappropriate ways.
Every time a mass shooting happens, there are loud calls to “do something this time!” I argue that we have the control to do something right now, without any new laws: Please, take interest in our youth. Help them understand that they matter to you. That they are loved. Instead of calling for an unattainable government action, take control of your own community by investing time and attention in children. Take responsibility in your own village by helping our youth see their own inherent value.
All of us can do something this time. But will you?
