Reflecting on my youth, I can recall many of my previous classmates who had absent parents, less-than-ideal home lives, access to guns, and were enrolled in a non-policed and under-funded public school.
Haley Gallaher
I would never have thought to bring a gun to school when I was that age; my kid would never do something as horrific as bringing a weapon to school; if I were the school’s cop, I never would have let that kid inside. These are the things most of us are all thinking, right? Instead of asking what I can do to help, we ask whom we can blame. As a society, we want an easy and cogent answer as to how to end school shootings. Still, we are not interested in actually looking into why they are happening in the first place. It’s always stricter gun laws, better parenting, more attentive teachers, or a more proactive police force – these are frequently the arguments you hear.
Everyone seems to want to blame a single entity for this plague of violence. Still, no one is stopping to ask that even if every single one of these debate points changed, would that solve the root issue? Or would that be putting a Band-Aid on the fundamental cause? What I mean by that is, would that reveal WHY these kids are shooting others, or would that give us peace of mind by believing there is a way to prevent guns from entering the school?
It’s incredible how our emotions can motivate our actions. By politicizing the issue, we have become polarized in our thinking. This egocentric thinking has us focused on being correct to the extent that we ignore mental health and societal issues at play. Reflecting on my youth, I can recall many of my previous classmates who had absent parents, less-than-ideal home lives, access to guns, and were enrolled in a non-policed and under-funded public school. However, none of them brought a gun to school with the intent to kill others. Many kids in the United States face many of these issues and don’t act out in violence.
Shouldn’t that make us question why the ones who resort to mass destruction choose that as their coping mechanism? Is there any more tremendous cry for help? Where did society fail these children? How can we do better? These are the questions that every American should ask. Instead of fighting each other over who has the quixotic answer to solve the school shootings. I genuinely believe that the antithetical opinions on managing this violent crisis among our school children are the opposite of what would be conducive to finding a sustainable and buildable solution.
We need to question what happened that was so futile for these children to make them believe that shooting their classmates is the answer, not whom we can fault this time. I do not think there is a single correct answer to this heartbreaking situation. We can examine our youth’s mental and societal breakdown by putting our egos aside. This realization may allow for more clarity on how we can start to heal and learn the WHY of this school shooting epidemic.
