Not All Heroes Carry Guns
(TW: School shootings)
You can’t stop them with your thoughts. I know that. I’m not just some dumb kid, I’m nearly seven.
You can’t stop them with prayers either, but in case he’s listening. In case he can hear me over the bangs and the screams. Are you there, God? It’s me, Maggie.
You can’t ban them. The man on TV says so. Only the bad actors then. Not the good ones like in the Barbie Movie. Mom said I was too young but I saw it at Harper’s sleepover.
Miss Soto will stop them though. She’s really nice. Everyone listens to her.
Extroduction
I’m sorry, America. There’s a lot I don’t understand about your country but this one is top of the list. I remember Dunblane. I was 14 years old. I remember the news reports and the songs and the appeals and the endless photos of flowers and teddy bears lining the streets of a small town in Scotland. It was the deadliest mass shooting in UK history, and within a year, laws had been passed to make it harder to own a gun, in a country which already had decent gun control. In other countries, a single school shooting has been enough to make international headlines and new laws. American school shootings don’t even necessarily take the top spot on national news. Stats vary widely, but even the lowest estimate I could find was 8 school shootings in the US this year (the highest was 143, just over one every 2 days).
So, Rochelle’s nice picture of guitars, reminded me of the video below. It’s over a year old, and it may say something that I don’t know whether or which school shooting it refers to. Please watch it.
Some more notes, specifically about heroes:
Harper in my story was named for Harper Moyski who died in Minneapolis last month. She was 10. The boy who died with her was 8, and the youngest victim taken to hospital was 6 years old. One of the heroes of that story was a little boy called Victor who was shot while lying on his friend, Weston, trying to protect him. Weston was unharmed; Victor was taken to hospital and survived.
Miss Soto is Victoria Leigh Soto, a Sandy Hook teacher who died protecting her class. Twenty 6 and 7 year olds died in that event, together with six teachers.
We called Dunblane a ‘massacre’. The government was given little choice but to enact reform (even against high profile resistance from, among others, the Royal family). In the USA, they seem to call these things Tuesday.
elmowrites 