My wife, Marsha, and I were discussing the mass shooting in Uvalde this week. Marsha was an elementary school teacher and I was a substitute teacher for many years. I taught in elementary, middle and high school so these horrible events affect both of us very much.
I have been contacting teacher associations across the country sharing with them the idea of having walkouts by teachers for the next school year. These would be held if sensible gun safety legislation is not passed by Congress. These walkouts could be coordinated with students who want their voices to be heard on this issue.
This could be done one day a week and teachers and students could leave the classroom, but stay on campus. Teachers could also decide to take off using their “sick days.” This could be a national effort having teachers coordinate when these sick days would be.
In 2018 Greta Thunberg protested outside the Swedish parliament asking them to take action against climate change. She would skip school every Friday to protest. Her protests went viral on social media which were spread with the hashtag #FridayForFuture. This became an international protest by young people around the world. I believe this could happen around the issue of commonsense gun safety measures that would save the lives of not only students and teachers, but people shopping at super markets, attending concerts, going to nightclubs, going to movie theaters or worshipping at churches, temples and mosques, these are some of the places where mass shootings have occurred.
Those of us who speak out on the issue of gun safety legislation do not want to take guns away from legal gun owners. This is propaganda spread by the NRA, gun lobby and a number of members of Congress and other politicians. The Second Amendment allows for the ownership of guns, but I doubt that the founders of our country had the ownership of weapons of war such as AR-15s equipped with high-capacity magazines in mind when they wrote the Second Amendment.
In 1934, Congress passed the National Firearms Act restricting the sale of “gangster weapons,” which included machine guns and sawed off shot guns. The NRA supported this action. In 1994, the Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act, commonly called the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, was signed into law by President Bill Clinton. Presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan wrote a letter in May 1994 supporting the bill. After both these acts were passed into law, the government did not confiscate guns from legal gun owners. There was no “slippery slope” that the NRA promotes where if there are any restrictions on gun ownership more restrictions will be enacted until guns are finally confiscated by the government. What utter nonsense. There is an estimated 350 to 400 million guns in our country today. That is enough guns for every man, woman and child in the United States.
One of simplest things to do that most Americans support would be to raise the age to 21 that a person could buy an assault weapon. There is a database project undertaken by the Washington Post that tracks every act of gunfire at schools in the United States since 1999. Two-thirds of these incidents the shooter was found to be 18 or less. A vast majority of Americans also support enhanced background checks.
I do not belong to any political party. If Democrats were opposing gun safety legislation, I would speak out against them. Sadly, it is Republican elected officials who are blocking meaningful gun safety measures that the vast majority of people in our country support.
When will we finally stand up and say “No more Columbine’s, no more Sandy Hook’s, no more Virginia Tech’s, no more Stoneman Douglas’, no more Robb Elementary’s, no more deaths at our schools?” Let your voices be heard!
PS: As I am sending this there was a mass shooting in a Tulsa hospital. When will the madness end!
Howard Shapiro is a resident of Volcano.