I’m a conservative gun owner, but after Uvalde, I’m rethinking our culture around firearms
I’m a conservative mother of four who goes to a gun range semi-regularly to practice. But after the Uvalde tragedy, I’ve wrestled with what it means to keep our children safe.
I’m not the only one. A new back to school ad released Tuesday by the political group Mothers Against Greg Abbott pits juxtaposes a child’s innocence and gun violence. In the ad, an upbeat country song plays while a mom dresses her young boy for school. When the song ends and the camera pans out, the boy is wearing body armor and a helmet.
“Our kids aren’t soldiers,” the ad reads. “Vote for change November 8.”
The ad sounds happy but looks macabre. The irony exaggerates, but it’s jarring and makes a salient point: In Uvalde, 19 kids similar to the boy in the ad were obliterated so badly the coroner has purposely refused to describe what he saw when identifying their bodies. Our kids are indeed not soldiers and apparently, the law enforcement who arrived in Uvalde to help that day and failed to act aren’t, either.
The coroner need not go into graphic detail. Over four years ago, a similarly deranged shooter entered another school, Marjorie Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, Florida, and killed 17 adults and high school students. The killer has already been found guilty but his sentencing trial has been ongoing for weeks now, and broadcast to the public.
The trial has shown grisly evidence of what an AR-15 does to a human body. It’s almost unimaginable save for the fact that multiple medical examiners have taken to the stand to describe it. Students who survived have been called to testify and show graphic photos and videos from their cell phones to the jury.
Members of the generation that grew up online, whose instinct was to film the tragedy as it unfolded, had to live through more guilt and trauma as they played for the jury the sounds of friends moaning as they died.
Between the chilling audio, emotional testimony of parents — the mother of one victim, Luke Hoyer, still hasn’t moved his cell phone charger from the outlet in his room the day he was killed — and the technical verbiage of the medical examiner’s analysis, the Parkland sentencing trial is Exhibit A of the terrible evils a human can inflict upon others.
There are all kinds of evil in the world, but that perpetrated on children, innocent human beings, seems the most gut-wrenching. For a parent, losing a child, especially to a heinous tragedy, represents the unthinkable. Most parents would rather die than outlive their children. Keeping them safe is centermost in the mind, and in times like these, nauseatingly so.
School shootings fall squarely into the category of a particularly painful evil because it’s traditionally a place set apart for instruction, not a place one would need to fortify then escape. This has been magnified the last few weeks as Texans have grappled with Uvalde’s aftermath and wrestle with ways to prevent it.
From Columbine and Sandy Hook to Parkland and Uvalde, they are tragedies borne of a thousand different broken protocols: The aftermath leads some people to rampage against guns, others to harden schools, some to champion health. Some survivors, sadly, can no longer bear the pain and choose a more permanent escape.
It’s hard to look at the last few years of school shootings and not pivot in some way toward gun policy. It seems like the element where control is most possible. Look at London, for example, where gun crime is low and school shootings are nonexistent.
School shootings represent a complex number of problems, from mental health and lack of community support to loopholes in gun policy and loose school safety procedures. But until we resolve all of those perfectly, both sides of the political aisle must recognize what powerful guns can do in the hands of the wrong people.
Sometimes, I’m not sure conservatives see this. They tout not just their love for the Second Amendment but they show off their gun like a piece of jewelry. Guns are not for the Gram. For school shooter survivors, this braggadocio about guns is disrespectful. Post-Uvalde, I see that now.
But is there an AR-15-related gun policy that can protect rights and catch the next would-be shooter? If there was, would it rid the world of evil? Probably not. Would it at least rid the world of parents knowing their 10 year-old died with wounds that rendered their sweet selves unrecognizable?
Evil has plagued us since the beginning of time and the problem of evil will continue, whatever America’s gun policies turn out to be. In fact, many policies are an attempt to simply curb culture that’s gone wrong. Yet parents cannot ever fully protect their children from depravity and suffering.
As horrifying as it is to realize this, we must recognize that all of these policy and community efforts come from a genuine desire to keep our kids safe and an unrealistic, impossible desire to shield them from evil their whole lives. The former, we should never stop doing, the latter we cannot do at all.
