Thoughts and prayers won't solve school shootings

Little has changed in the decade since the last elementary school shooting, let's not repeat the same mistakes.

When I was 15, we used to have drills for what we called “Code White”. We would practice pushing all of the desks up against the classroom door, turn off our phones, and sit along the far wall absolutely silent. Every semester we would have an assembly where we would watch a video about what to do if a Code White happened and you were in the bathroom - how to hide in a stall so that no one would know you were in there, or what to do if you were in the hallway and could not get to a classroom. 

Code White was the term my high school used for an active shooter. 

Growing up in Canada, school shootings are a relatively uncommon phenomenon. From 2009 to 2018, Canada had two of them, while the United States had 288. In the same way that my parents talk about practice drills in case Russia dropped a nuclear bomb, my generation will talk about how we practiced hiding in our classrooms - with the notable difference that for my parents’ generation, it was always hypothetical. For a growing number of students in my generation, it is a statistically possible occurrence. 

This, of course, brings us to Tuesday, when Salvador Ramos, an 18-year-old student at Uvalde High School, shot and killed 19 students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School. The Robb Elementary School shooting is now the most deadly in the United States this year, and the third most fatal school shooting in the United States, just behind Sandy Hook, 28, and Virginia Tech, 33. Since Tuesday, and undoubtedly in the days to come, stories have emerged about the victims, shooter, and other topics that we have become accustomed to seeing fill our Facebook feeds in the wake of these tragedies. But before we begin yet another conversation about the mental health of lonely teenage boys who are by and large the perpetrators of these incidents - and that is absolutely an important topic - and Tweet out our #thoughtsandprayers for the families of the victims, let’s finally overcome the hurdles for a much overdue reckoning. 

On Wednesday morning, as I continued to follow the updates from Uvalde and think about what I wanted to say about it - what it might be appropriate for me to say, one headline in the New York Times disturbed me more than any other because of how much it said about the current attitude toward school shootings: “Gun makers’ stocks, which often rise after mass shootings, jump”. The morning following the shooting, while families were reeling for their lost children, Smith & Wesson’s stock was up some 10-percent, Strum Ruger was up 4-percent, and Vista Outdoor was up over 8-percent. A jump in the share price for gun manufacturers is, apparently, a common occurrence in the wake of school shootings when those fearing the possibility of restrictions on gun ownership rush to purchase firearms. 

Let’s break that down…

Children were shot and killed in their classrooms, and the biggest concern for a not insignificant number of people is that they might not be able to purchase the gun they want. 

That should be enough. That response to a school shooting should be sufficient to push legislators to take action. That fact should be enough to make everyone take action to get the guns out of their homes and communities.

But it won’t be, so I’ll keep going. 

Just like this is not the moment to talk about mental health, it is also not the moment to talk about how even if guns are banned, shootings will still happen because criminals find ways to get guns, and so forth. While just like mental health, that is true and a meaningful conversation to have, it simply isn’t a relevant argument in the case of school shootings. Guns used to commit school shootings, including Robb Elementary School, Stoneman Douglas, and Sandy Hook, are almost always purchased legally by the shooter, or their parent or relative. 

When the use of a legally purchased firearm to kill children en masse is a motive to acquire more weapons, just in case it prompts legislators to restrict access to firearms; something is profoundly and fundamentally broken. But it’s also a fear that is predicated on very little. After the Columbine High School Massacre in 1999 that left 15 people dead, policymakers encouraged adults to engage in safe storage of their firearms. Still, they did little to restrict the sale of weapons in the United States. In the 23 years since the Columbine shooting, very little has changed in the United States regarding access to guns, and school shootings have only continued to increase both in their frequency and lethality. 

Ten years ago, I was sitting at a hotel with my mother, watching the news report that 20 six and seven-year-old children had been murdered in their classroom. We sat there in shock as the details continued to unfold, but we said to ourselves that it would be the thing that would finally tilt the scales towards gun reform in the United States. How could the leader of the free world be a place where going to grade one was potentially a death sentence? 

For the last ten years, every time there has been a school shooting, and there have been close to 300 of them, we have heard the same arguments about the second amendment and the right to bear arms, about how most gun owners never harm anyone, and on it goes. But something, at some point, has to be enough. Even if it’s true that only 5-percent of legal gun owners will use that weapon in a crime, in 2019, upwards of 49-percent of households had a firearm in them. Keeping in mind that before the pandemic, there were already more guns than people in the United States and that gun ownership has increased, it’s safe to say that 5-percent is a lot of guns. 

Elizabeth Warren, discussing the payday lending trap, uses an example that can also apply to the arguments around gun regulation. It goes like this:

If a toaster had even a 1-percent chance of exploding and setting your kitchen on fire, it would be taken off the market immediately. On both sides of the aisle, we agree that if a toaster poses even a small risk of exploding, it needs to be recalled, and we need to impose regulations to ensure that the toasters on the market are safe and won’t kill us. If 5-percent of legally purchased firearms are used to take life, including the lives of children in their schools, shouldn’t we have the same reaction to them as we do to toasters? If 5-percent of legally purchased guns kill people, isn’t it time to impose regulations that stop this from happening? And if you respond that guns aren’t toasters, you’re right. Guns are designed to kill people - toasters aren’t. 

Horrifically, tragically, we are once again reading about elementary school children murdered in their classrooms. This cannot be another wasted opportunity for change.