Heroes, Children & the Right to Life
When children and young adults become the heroes, the narrative must change. When children and young adults become the pawns on a government’s chess board of regulations and legislation, the narrative must change.
May 7th brought us another school shooting and another young life taken saving the lives of others. [1]Kendrick Castillo was in class at Highlands Ranch STEM High School when a shooter opened fire. He charged the gunman and died for his efforts. They were not in vain as the lives of fellow classmates were spared. Kendrick was only 18 years old and has done more to protect students from gun violence than America’s entire sitting government.
Just the week prior at the University of North Carolina another young man died tackling an active shooter in his classroom. 21 year old Riley Howell also died saving his classmates, shot in the struggle by a 22 year old male packing a [2]legally purchased handgun and a large amount of ammunition.
As our leaders offer up their empty thoughts and irrelevant prayers our children are practicing live shooter drills in classrooms across this country. Children as young as kindergartners and preschoolers are learning to hide under desks, tape paper over door windows and more importantly to not cry in the event a shooter unleashes violence on their school.
The heartbreaking sounds of children dying in their schools, people violently murdered in places of worship are lost in the catastrophic rhetoric being spun by those more afraid of losing their guns than their families. The same crowd that vehemently asserts that a government has the legal right to force women to give birth based solely on the declaration of ‘the right to life’, stand unflinchingly in protest against those desperately trying to save the lives of their own living and breathing children.
The second amendment proclaiming ‘A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed’, has been the heart beat of organizations like the NRA (National Rifle Association) as they seek to arm the masses; putting profits over life and fear over common sense.
The word ‘infringed’ seems to be up for interpretation by all sides. Should it be interpreted as literally ‘guns for everyone’, when we have children dying in the classroom? When we have abusive partners and spouses exhibiting violent behavior? When we have mentally ill individuals unable to control impulses?
Second Amendment defenders all shouting we need more guns to stop the gun violence leaves the rest of us shaking our heads and cleaning out our ears, uncertain we heard them correctly. Nonsensical claims that if we just arm everyone the world will be safer drums across the sound waves of a 24 hour news cycle, as legislatures draft bills to arm teachers in their classrooms.
Kendrick Castillo and Riley Howell were neither one armed when they disarmed their school shooters. 29 year old James Shaw Jr didn’t have a firearm in his possession when he bravely tackled a shooter at a Waffle House in Tennessee last year and unlike the others, he survived to tell about it. [3]
We have all heard the exhaustive assertion that ‘guns are not the problem, people are the problem’. Yet we continue to give guns to the problem!
Regulating firearms is not a blanket infringement upon the right to ‘keep and bear Arms’. You can’t drive a car in this country without being trained and licensed, yet you can buy and use a firearm. You can not vote in this country until the age of 18, yet in most states a 14 year old can legally buy a rifle.
The Constitution [4]has been successfully amended 27 times in its brief history, with a total of 33 proposed Amendments approved by Congress. The most recent amendment being the 27th, ratified over 202 years after its congressional approval, taking effect as recently as May 5, 1992. Amending the Constitution is not easy nor is it impossible, the recorded timeline reads like a history book of documented change. Society changes and thus, so do our laws.
Americans grapple with what once was, what is and what is becoming every single day. Change seemingly moving faster than a churning ocean, leaving us all drowning in the tides of corruption. Riding the wave of back room deals filled with the dirty money tied to our sails and lobbyist at the helm, it’s no surprise how we got here.
Whether you call it spiraling down or rising up, our country is on the verge of imploding and each and every one of us are responsible for what happens next. If we can’t find common ground over the lives of children, what does that really say about the country we have become? More importantly what does that say about you? Or them? Or us?
Every day each of us either sit or we stand, but we all are witness to this ongoing experiment in democracy, called America. Beginning with the idea of freedom and getting further from it every day, perhaps we can all bravely come together and ensure there will be children to pass it along to.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/08/us/colorado-shooting-victims.html
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-north-carolina-shooting/slain-north-carolina-college-student-confronted-gunman-saved-lives-idUSKCN1S73DC
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/04/22/james-shaw-jr-on-why-he-rushed-the-waffle-house-shooter-he-was-going-to-have-to-work-to-kill-me/?utm_term=.b94228ef3a05
[4] https://www.senate.gov/pagelayout/reference/three_column_table/measures_proposed_to_amend_constitution.htm
