When I see my children exit the school building each afternoon at dismissal, I breathe a sigh of relief. This fear follows me from one day to the next—from one school year to another. As a new school year begins and another presidential election draws near, nothing else matters until our children are safe at school.
There are countless broken branches of our political system. Between solidifying women’s inalienable rights, passing environmental policies to preserve our future, and ensuring healthcare access for all, we have our work cut out for us for decades. But as a mother, I cannot begin to consider my access to a legal abortion or solutions to climate change until my children can enter their school building and be guaranteed to survive the day.
Children’s lives have been taken by semi-automatic weapons, and thoughts and prayers are not enough to bring them back—or to prevent further death. Another school year spent losing innocent lives needlessly, while prayers fall by the wayside, is wasted time. Now is our chance to vote for those who want semiautomatic weapons removed from our streets. Nothing else is more important.
The assumption that the odds are low for our children to find themselves in a battlefield is outdated. In 2023, so far, there have been at least eighty-six incidents of gunfire on school grounds—no location or child is immune. There have been 386 school shootings since the catastrophe at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999. Every day, twelve children die from gun violence in the United States and another thirty-two are shot and injured. Lulls between mass shootings provide a sense of renewed comfort and security—but we can’t let ourselves fall victim to this false hope anymore.
I’m exhausted from inquiring if my children’s school has the latest security system, whether all of its doors can lock tightly, and if police have a plan for the worst. I am overwhelmed from worrying about my children’s chance of survival, leaving me devoid of energy to focus on their academics or their mental health. I’m sickened by the growing list of children dying at the hands of mass murderers, knowing that without these weapons of warfare, these children would still be here today.
We can enhance access to mental health services for those in need, but not until we promise our children they’re safe at school and ensure that we’re doing all we can to mean it—they deserved that twenty years ago.
Last year, I wrote to President Joe Biden asking what I could do about gun violence as a mother. “Each time Jill and I visit grief-stricken loved ones, they have one message for us: Do something,” Biden wrote in his response to me. He informed me that he’d signed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which was intended to keep guns out of the hands of people who are a danger to themselves and others.
This act requires enhanced background checks for people under age twenty-one and makes gun trafficking and straw purchasing—buying a gun for someone else who is prohibited from purchasing one—federal crimes. So much more needs to be done, but the only way to make progress is to elect candidates who consider the lives of young people a priority—that is what we can do now.
TIME magazine listed the countries that restricted assault weapons after just one mass shooting—if they can do it, so can we. In fact, the United States banned assault weapons in 1994, but the ban expired in 2004 and has not been reinstated. Each day we continue to allow the purchase of semi-automatic weapons is one more day we enable this catastrophe to widen, and we fail to protect the most vulnerable in our society.
Each day we continue to allow the purchase of semi-automatic weapons is one more day we enable this catastrophe to widen, and we fail to protect the most vulnerable in our society.
“For those we’ve lost, for those we can save, and for the nation we love, I hope you will join me and the majority of Americans—including gun owners—in this fight,” Biden said in his letter to me, but his words are not enough. We must elect those who feel the same to Congress to save countless children’s lives this year. Our children need us now before it’s too late.
Let’s put our children’s wellbeing ahead of our own beliefs and push to remove weapons of warfare from our streets. Because our children are depending on us.
Only then can we begin to focus on the many other pressing matters in our midst.