Trigger Warning: Gun Violence, Death
Pictured above: portraits of the fourteen victims from the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in 2018.
When our children and grandchildren see vintage photos from the pandemic and ask us what it was like, the emotion most of us will first recall is fear: fear of racial violence during the summer protests, fear of monarchism during the transition between presidents, fear of the disease killing our friends and families while demolishing our hospitals, fear of flunking remote classes, and an almost infinite list of other fear-inducing events. Amidst the utter apocalypse we are surviving, though, virtual school serves as a solution to a less mild fear of ours: no school means no school shootings.
In the last fourteen months, American children, for the first time since the Columbine massacre, did not have to watch newsreels of families mourning their dead children, wondering if their school would be next. Gone were the too-realistic active shooter drills or the infomercial-like videos about reporting suspicious comments on social media. Quarantine, it appears, was a much more effective gun control measure than we could have ever dreamt of getting from politicians. As much as we might have gotten used to this hiatus, though, it will not last forever. Assuming we reach herd immunity, high school will return to normal next semester: students crowding into classrooms and cafeterias like ants. Suicidal ideation and gun ownership in our nation, meanwhile, will remain at nauseating abnormal highs. A recent April 13th shooting at a high school in Tennessee, and another on May 6th at a middle school in Idaho, were bleak reminders of the risk we will be putting ourselves into when we return to full in-person instruction.
Virtual school began in an era when it was never more dangerous to sit inside an American classroom. American media outlets have recorded over 180 shootings in the last decade, and just in 2018 there were 37 students killed and 68 injured from gunfire at schools, not to mention the immeasurable neurological stress that afflicts witnesses until their own ultimate deaths. While school shootings are likelier to occur in white rural areas, Los Angeles is not invincible either, and the Saugus High School shooting in Santa Clarita in 2019 was evidence that these attacks are closing in on cities. With metropolitan school districts like our own relocating school police officers outside campuses, this upcoming semester will be buck fever for students considering shooting their school. Although the absence of cops will make school much less dangerous for students of color, in the event of a shooting, students, hidden in closets, will have to wait multiple minutes for the police sirens to arrive. Minutes means lives.
As municipal and state governments have dialed down pandemic restrictions, more people have begun filling public places with pedestrian traffic, making them vulnerable to semiautomatic assault rifles. In the last few months, this heightened danger has been made obvious with the series of mass shootings littering our news headlines: Atlanta, Boulder, Indianapolis, Orange, and San Jose. The national epidemic of gun violence that escaped our attention throughout quarantine is now returning quicker than ever.
Although kids in the United States might have had guns within their reach during quarantine, there were no classrooms to use them in. Soon, that lack of danger will become a relic, and so should the freedom-drunk gun legislation that permitted school shootings in the first place. Our government can, if it pleases, abolish gun ownership in America. We must admit that our Constitution is unsound, and that the second amendment was created eons before the video-game-like guns of our current generation were invented. We must make it illegal for gun companies to sponsor politicians. And most of all, we must value human lives above the partisan spectrum, a spectrum that relies on controversial issues like gun possession to rile up voters and further distance the left and right wings from each other. If the general public cannot be trusted to consume menthol cigarettes, it should not have the right to shoot guns, either.
Yes, mental illness deserves our legislative elbow grease, and reducing violence in America also means offering state-funded therapeutic and medicinal treatment to those suffering from depression and other mental illnesses. If humans did not own guns, however, this issue would be far less lethal. In the last few weeks, multiple gun control measures have shown up in state legislatures across the nation, but are sinking in conservative opposition. On April 30th, for example, liberal state representatives in Colorado introduced three new gun reform measures in reflex to a March 22nd shooting in their state, in which a man killed nine customers and one police officer at a supermarket: a bill rescinding an earlier laissez-faire bill that prevented the state government from imposing gun regulation, a law demanding more extensive background checks on firearm purchases, and a law establishing a new office to examine gun violence in Colorado. Still, even if these motions pass, as long as Americans have the constitutional right to own guns, those guns will wind up in the fingers of suicidal high school students. In California, the least lenient state on gun possession and sales, shootings are still responsible for 68.02% of annual homicides.
Our obsession with guns in the United States leaves more than ourselves inside crosshairs. American firearm companies export 37% of the international volume of guns, 47% of those foreign sales are to countries in the Middle East region prone to violence, Saudi Arabia being our most lucrative customer. Worse, there is also a constant southern flow of unlicensed guns from the United States into gangs in Mexico and Central America. According to officials, 70% of the firearms seized in Mexico were first sold in America. It seems inevitable that this influx in firearms on our planet will make school shootings, a phenomenon once specific to America, more frequent across the world. Earlier this month, a man killed nine people at a middle school in Russia. The disaster is not imminent; it is here.
Quarantine will end, but the revenue-focused gun legislation that plagues America, as well as the mental illnesses that lead people to kill others, will remain. Our species will go extinct if we cannot figure out how to remove lethal machines from the fingers of people who will use them for evil. As a sophomore in remote learning, I never had to wonder if each loud noise I heard while in class, whether it be a car engine revving up on my street or audio cutting out on a zoom call, was gunfire. And in the future, none of us ever should.
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