Guns Over Children

On a recent sunny late September morning, my wife and I watched the highly entertaining Jogathon at our 4th grade grandson’s elementary school. The delightfully chaotic event was held on an upper field on the school grounds. The 4th graders jogged, ran, walked and giggled around a 100 meter loop. 

We entered through a gate in the fence that encloses the playground and stopped for visitor name tags at a table staffed by PTO volunteers. It was an appropriate gesture of security, I suppose, but to no realistic end. The field where children giggled and adults snapped photos is essentially open in every direction. 

Later in the week we picked up our 8th grade granddaughter after school. At dismissal, hundreds of kids burst into the afternoon sun, some walking home and others headed to bikes, buses - or waiting grandparents.

I note this to revisit a point I frequently make. School security measures may be necessary, but are utterly insufficient in a culture besotted with guns and the many angry, delusional, disturbed or sociopathic men and boys who itch to use them. 

During last week’s VP “debate,” the slick and ambitiously dishonest JD Vance clucked sympathetically about school shootings and then suggested making doors and windows stronger along with a recommendation for more resource officers - good guys with guns. I don’t suppose he considered open fields of joggers or swarms of middle-schoolers blinking into the afternoon sun. (Statistically, the vast majority of shootings occur outside school buildings.) All of these school security measures are tantamount to shutting the barn door after most of the horses are romping in the pasture.

Tim Walz was only marginally better, wincing slightly at the notion of schools as prisons, but quickly pivoting to his and Kamala’s gun-toting bona fides, including a declaration that they are both big Second Amendment supporters. 

It often seems that the Constitution has only two Amendments, #1 and #2, with the First cited to protect religion and the Second cited to protect the right to bear arms of any kind, anywhere, any time. Many folks like their God and guns, often in combination.

In 2008, candidate Barack Obama, referring to working-class voters in old industrial towns decimated by job losses, said: "They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment. . .” 

Obama was excoriated for this apt description of a segment of Americana. Little did he (or we) know that he was predicting the entire platform of the 2024 Republican Party.

Accompanying the prisonification of schools is a burgeoning security industry. It is apparently not enough for schools to drill the kids relentlessly in faux-academics. Now they must be proficient in active shooter drills, learning when, where and how to cower in fear. 40 states mandate active shooter drills.

My granddaughter has expressed anxiety about the possibility of gun violence. Her school has initiated several lockdowns - and we live in a safe and privileged community. Both grandchildren have told of gun-related anxiety, among their friends and them. I believe that this anxiety is always present, despite that their schools at least don’t engage in “realistic” drills with little bodies strewn on hallway floors

.

The toll of this stress is both inestimable and invisible. There has been some recognition of the psychological damage done by the more frightening iterations of safety drills. New York City schools are now banned from “. . .conducting full-scale exercises that mimic an actual school shooting in coordination with emergency responders and with the use of props, actors, simulations, or other methods,” according to ASIS International.

Our unwillingness to protect children is a moral failure that will reverberate for decades. 

A moral nation would ban weapons of war completely, with severe legal consequences for selling or possessing.

A moral nation would mandate registration, licensing and insurance for any weapon.

A moral nation would outlaw carrying any weapon in public with significant fines and confiscation for any violation. 

A truly moral nation would repeal the archaic and irrelevant Second Amendment so that the above legislative actions could be taken without absurd constitutional challenges.

Instead we conduct deeply frightening drills and our leaders announce their gun bona fides on national television. 

I, for one, don’t think my grandchildren are safer because Kamala Harris has a gun and Tim Walz loves hunting.

Let’s be honest. We love our guns more than we love our children.