Not One More

7,000 pairs of shoes.

7,000 in just over five years, from December 2012 to March 2018.

14,000 empty shoes representing the 7,000 children not here to wear them. The 7,000 children missing because a bullet fired from a gun killed them.

It’s a staggering number.

It’s a number I keep seeing people try to minimize with “whatabouts” and BS comparisons. Yes, a lot of children die from car wrecks, and pools, and illness, and poisoning from laundry detergent pods. Children die from falling dressers and TVs. Children die from choking on a grape, or a hotdog, or a bouncy ball they got as a party favor. 

Children die every day, and in many of these cases there are laws passed, new regulations, and safety protocols to save children’s lives. We banned drop-side cribs in this country to prevent one more baby dying.

And none of these accidents, odd chances, and tragedies in any way lessen the horror of 7,000 children dead in just over 5 years, about 1,400 per year, from guns.

Before anyone jumps all over me about how I hate guns…just stop. I’m a gun owner and a damn good shot, I support reasonable regulation, and I’ve been a victim of crime because of guns.

The Spigot

Five years ago, someone broke into my house and tore my room apart trying to steal our guns. Since we use safe storage they failed and none of our guns were stolen. I learned a few things that day...

First, being a gun owner didn’t protect me from crime – it made me a target instead.

Second, I was lucky that day because the thief trying to steal our guns wasn’t armed and didn't want a confrontation. One of the reasons he didn’t have time to finish breaking our safe loose to take the whole thing with him is because I came home from work early and walked into the house with my three little girls. The police think he was standing behind the pulled down shade of the window he broke in through less than 10 feet from where I walked in with my three children. He took off when I realized what I was seeing and backed out of the house to dial 911.

Third, the responding officers lined up to shake my hand and thank me because the thief had hit several houses and mine was the first where he didn’t get a gun. Let that sink in…they told us the guy had hit more than 20 other houses over a few months and got a gun at every single other house. More than 200,000 guns were stolen from legal gun owners in 2016, and those are just the reported thefts. Unsecured guns in the homes of legal gun owners are a magnet for crime and a primary source of the illegal gun market.

The guy who robbed my house, and stole guns from a bunch of other houses, hasn’t been caught.

An Endless Flood

Columbine happened while I was in college and everyone was shocked and horrified. Then there was Virginia Tech in 2007, Fort Hood in 2009, Tucson in 2011, Aurora in 2012, Newtown in 2012, San Bernardino in 2015, Charleston in 2015, Orlando in 2016, Las Vegas in 2017, and Parkland in 2018.

These are just the mass shootings that make the national news and stick in our mind. There are so many more. Many, many terrifyingly more.

So, every day I hug my girls and tell them I love them before they go to school because I’m afraid they may be lost in a hail of bullets through their classroom windows and I’ll never hug them again.

It is horrible that our response to living in a country where mass shootings are a monthly occurrence, where high school children were executed by classmates, where a disgruntled retiree can kill and wound hundreds at a concert, where 20 first-graders died huddled in the corner of their bright, cheerful class room with their teacher, is to teach my children how to cower in the dark and hope the shooter passes them by.

It’s an indictment of all the adults in this country that my children cannot see the sky from their classroom windows because they’ve been blocked with blinds and paper for safety. Not that blinds or paper will stop bullets, but if a shooter can’t see the children hiding he might not spray bullets through the windows and doors and kill them all.

We should all be deeply ashamed of this.

While fervent proponents of gun ownership scream about their rights to own and carry whatever firearms they can get their hands on, what happened to the idea that your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins?

We all have a bloody nose.

More guns everywhere will not make us safer and I definitely don’t want my kids’ teachers armed. I'm sure of this because I've spent time at gun ranges. Gun safety is built into range rules, yet all you have to do is look up at the mass of bullet holes in the ceiling of any indoor range to know that accidents and carelessness happen. Also, consider that yesterday a gun safety instructor and reserve police officer put a bullet through a classroom ceiling injuring several students.

Praying doesn’t fix gun deaths either. We’ve been giving this issue thoughts and prayers since 1999 and nothing has changed.

Until last month I was sure nothing would change because our legislators lacked the political will to challenge the NRA and represent their constituents’ desire for change. I was convinced we wouldn’t see any movement on this issue until we had an Emmitt Till moment on gun violence and everyone had to see, up close and in full color, what an AR-15 does to the body of a child. 

It’s a damned tragedy that something is finally happening because another school has been shot to pieces by a man wielding a semi-automatic, AR-style rifle. Only instead of first-graders it’s teenagers with smartphones.

Phones they used to call parents tell them they loved them in case they didn’t make it home. Phones they used to interview each other as they cowered in classrooms waiting to die. Phones they used to video the carnage as they were led out of their school past dead and injured classmates. Phones they’re using to call out gun lobbyists and legislators on social media. Phones they’re using to spark a national movement to fix our broken gun laws.

Today, students across the country participated in a nationwide school walk out to honor the 17 lives lost at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. In some cases, whole schools walked out, in others a single student bravely stood outside alone. From universities to grade schools, students marched out of class to demand adults do something, to plead with us to protect them, to remind us that their right to live is more precious than someone’s right to own a gun.

7,000 pairs of shoes lay on the capitol lawn yesterday to show us, viscerally with endless empty rows, what 7,000 missing children looks like, and my daughter’s school walked out today and observed 17 minutes of silence to honor the dead children and teachers in Parkland, Florida.

What about the other 6,983 children? They’d have to stay silent for five days if they gave one minute for each child’s life lost to guns in the last five years.

We can’t bring them back. We can’t undo the tragedy and return those lost children to their parents. All we can do is fix this broken, shitty system where lobbyist money counts for more than children’s lives, and place reasonable protections around gun ownership to make our babies safer.

Our children are in the streets demanding it. The rest of us need to stand up and do something.

Three reasons I've joined Moms Demand Action