It is not even March yet and already there have been 18 school shootings in the U.S. Eighteen!
It’s almost as if this number is screaming at people for something to change, but instead people decided to argue over what characterizes a “school shooting.” I cannot fathom how after so many have lost their lives, the loss of innocence, and the loss of being able to feel safe in a school, politicians can only focus on the Second Amendment. After the Florida massacre, many students rallied together and began #NeverAgain, and protests all over the country occurred. Speaker Florence Yared, a Stoneman Douglas student, stressed that she didn’t want to ban all guns. Yared stated, “I’m not trying to take away your Second Amendment rights, nor am I trying to eliminate all guns. But we cannot protect our guns before we protect our children.” According to Yared, “The only purpose of an assault weapon like this is to kill, and to kill as many people as possible. The AR-15 is not a self-defense weapon. It is called an assault weapon. Assault. Think about this word.”
To me, the Second Amendment was always about being able to protect yourself and having the right to carry a weapon. Yet, Yared brings up a good point. Why would anyone want to have an assault weapon just for the mere need to protect themselves? Most people don’t go out and buy assault rifles. Yet, politics being the way that it is, this movement was taken by the head of the National Rifle Association (NRA) as a threat to the Second Amendment. “The elites don’t care not one whit about America’s school system and school children,” NRA chief executive Wayne LaPierre told a friendly audience of conservatives outside Washington. LaPierre claimed, “Their goal is to eliminate the Second Amendment and our firearms freedoms so they can eradicate all individual freedoms.”
Instead of decreasing the amount of guns that are available to students and decreasing their presence in schools, Trump and the NRA talk about arming teachers with guns for protection. “A gun-free zone to a killer, or somebody that wants to be a killer, that’s like going in for the ice cream,” Trump said. “They’re not going to walk into a school if 20 percent of the teachers have guns.”
How forcing teachers to worry about guns in the classroom, instead of doing their actual jobs – teaching – is a better solution than stricter gun laws that won’t hurt anyone is beyond me. Perhaps there is merit to this as a viable solution, but I personally have not done research into this; I just have my personal logic. Yet, one thing I wish politicians were able to do is have a conversation without automatically jumping to the defense of the Second Amendment. Politicians need to realize that the conversation is so much bigger than “This is going to take away our Second Amendment.” It shouldn’t be this hard to have a conversation about something that impacts students (the future) every day.
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