More innocent schoolchildren have been murdered. Mass gun murders are becoming an everyday headline. Do some people simply say, "Get used to it"? Some must, at their kitchen tables if not elsewhere.
In a discussion the other day, when I was inveighing against guns, a friend offered the scenario of a farmer being accosted by a herd of feral pigs. Wouldn't she need a gun to save her life?
Too bad we can't be sure that gun owners will behave responsibly.
I tried to imagine what it would have been like to go to school dreading possible gunfire. School was the safest place on earth when I was a child. Sources of fear were bullies, mean teachers, and air raid drills. Does anyone remember those? Loud sirens, unique sounds unlike the late bell would go off and we'd run to line the hallways, sitting against the walls with heads in laps, arms over heads. No, don't run. I never wondered what that would accomplish in the event of a nuclear strike. Remember those school kids in Scotland who ran to hide under their desks when that mammoth mudslide hit and killed so many? What else could the teacher have told them to do? They saw the avalanche heading toward them out the window.
As an adult, I met some wonderful people, liberal activists, who told me they protested against air raid drills by staying outside in broad daylight when those awful sirens went off. No one arrested them though. I was amazed at their defiance. That would never have occurred to this all-American schoolgirl who recited the Pledge of Allegiance so proudly every day. And said the Lord's Prayer also and was chastised the one day I whispered another prayer instead when my grandfather was sick.
"Someone isn't saying the Lord's Prayer," said the teacher when we were done with it. It was an accusation. She was a devout Catholic. I stared down at my desk feeling like a sinner but had some vague thoughts about being forced to pray. A classmate once asked me what I really say during our Lord's Prayer minutes. "Something in Hebrew," I lied to her respectful silence. Respectful. And we were around 10 if that in a very parochial era.
It was scary to be singled out as if I had sinned. Scary to hear those sirens amid the years we so feared being buried by Khrushchev. But nothing like fearing for your life every day when your parents take you to school. Does anyone walk to school anymore the way so many of us did back in the olden days? That was so safe also.
Pity the parents sending their kids off to school each day. Pity the sight of armed officials guarding schools now. They can be gunned down too. Is anyone safe when owning guns may as well be legal?
Pity a culture that won't take action and instead condones the slaughter of innocence. It's happened before. It's called war. I guess that until we do away with war deranged people will be able to own guns. At least in this country.
A friend of mine in South Korea tells me that there guns are illegal and no one gets murdered. Well, maybe one person a year. One too many, of course.
Millions and millions too many innocent people die by condoned violence. That's the ultimate tragedy ridiculing the values we are taught in elementary school if not religious school if not by our parents. But meanwhile, let's narrow down and get rid of guns. Then we can make violence illegal altogether.
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