A note from the author: This was written before the mass shooting in Louisville, KY, on April 10, 2023, in which five people died, and four were injured. This simply adds another horrific angle to the story described below.
Firearms have now become the leading cause of death in children in the United States of America. Not auto accidents, not cancer, not a major disease. Guns. Each time an alert has sounded about a shooting for the past year, my first thought has been: another one? I’ve been desensitized to the bloodshed. It’s easy to be desensitized, seeing as just around three months into the year, there have been 141 mass shootings in the US. For reference, there have only been 104 days in the year thus far. 10% of those shootings being in schools.
Not everyone has the privilege of being desensitized to these deaths. Like the mothers of the children who we simply add to a statistic. Like kids who have spent their whole lives with more intruder drills than fire drills (because we all know which one is a more significant threat). Like teachers who are now being told they must train to educate these kids, but also to lay down their lives for them. Teachers now have to know how to medically prevent a bullet wound from killing their students, and they have to know how to use a gun themselves.
It was only recently that I realized I wanted to be a teacher. High school English, because I don’t just want to teach kids how to read; I want to teach them how to think (very different from what to think), and I want to teach them how to formulate those thoughts. I am just crazy enough to think that words actually mean something in this world.
But I don’t want to be a teacher anymore. After March 27, every time I think about standing at the front of the classroom, I imagine the faces of thirty kids staring back at me, and I know that the weight of their lives is in my hands. Not just the weight of their minds but the weight of their beating hearts.
I don’t want to be a teacher if that means having to wield a gun with twenty-four hours of training – compared to the 300 hours of training to be a teacher. I don’t want to be a teacher in a world that won’t protect my students or me.
I believe in gun control. Sure, I believe that individuals incite violence, but much more violence can be done with an AR-15 than with a knife, no matter how many people try to tell me that guns are not a problem.
According to “The Gun Violence Archive,” over 4,000 mass shootings have occurred in the past ten years. These numbers almost doubled between 2018 and 2020, going from 336 shootings in 2018 to 610 in 2020. Operational definitions are important, so I will clarify what qualifies a mass shooting. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a mass shooting is when one or more individuals are “actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area.” The number of deaths does not matter, as many who have attempted to downplay the number of shootings have claimed.
An argument against gun control is that bad people don’t follow the laws, meaning that gun control won’t do anything. Here are some facts:
Audrey Hale purchased the gun used in the Nashville shooting completely legally.
Payton Gendren purchased the gun used in the 2023 Buffalo, New York shooting legally at a supermarket two weeks before the shooting.
Salvador Ramos purchased the guns used in the 2022 Robb Elementary School shooting legally just days after his eighteenth birthday.
The number of guns manufactured in the United States has increased drastically in the past decade. Alongside it: the drastic increase in mass shootings. 7,011,945 guns were produced in 2019. In 2021 there were a total of 13,802,787. This is over a 96% increase in gun manufacturing in two years. Coincidentally the number of mass shootings went from 415 in 2019 to 690 in 2021 (still the highest amount of mass shootings in a year to date).
A frequent argument is that gun control will not affect the number of mass shootings because evil people will always break the law. According to these arguments, bad people will always be able to get guns. A statistical study by Giffords Law Center compared the number of mass shootings per state to the strictness of their gun laws. This study showed an inverse correlation, meaning that the stricter the rules in a state, the fewer mass shootings have occurred there.
Another argument is that there has never been an example of increased gun control or decreased gun manufacturing working in a nation. This is simply not true. America has the highest amount of guns per capita (120.5), nearly doubling its next competitor, the Falkland Islands (62.1). In England, the number of guns per capita is 4.6, and they have some of the strictest gun control policies in the entire world. Just a reminder that the number of mass shootings in the United States since 2014 is over 4,000. There have been seven in the United Kingdom between 2010 and now. Another country with strict gun control laws is Greece. The last massacre that occurred in Greece was in 1994.
No one is saying that we are getting rid of guns completely. That isn’t what gun control means to most people utilizing the term. But there is a direct correlation between gun control legislation and lower amounts of gun violence. Ignoring these facts is killing our children.
So, no. I don’t want to be a teacher anymore. Not until we value our children more than our guns.
I don’t want to be a teacher anymore: thoughts after the Nashville shooting
A note from the author: This was written before the mass shooting in Louisville, KY, on April 10, 2023, in which five people died, and four were injured. This simply adds another horrific angle to the story described below.
Firearms have now become the leading cause of death in children in the United States of America. Not auto accidents, not cancer, not a major disease. Guns. Each time an alert has sounded about a shooting for the past year, my first thought has been: another one? I’ve been desensitized to the bloodshed. It’s easy to be desensitized, seeing as just around three months into the year, there have been 141 mass shootings in the US. For reference, there have only been 104 days in the year thus far. 10% of those shootings being in schools.
Not everyone has the privilege of being desensitized to these deaths. Like the mothers of the children who we simply add to a statistic. Like kids who have spent their whole lives with more intruder drills than fire drills (because we all know which one is a more significant threat). Like teachers who are now being told they must train to educate these kids, but also to lay down their lives for them. Teachers now have to know how to medically prevent a bullet wound from killing their students, and they have to know how to use a gun themselves.
It was only recently that I realized I wanted to be a teacher. High school English, because I don’t just want to teach kids how to read; I want to teach them how to think (very different from what to think), and I want to teach them how to formulate those thoughts. I am just crazy enough to think that words actually mean something in this world.
But I don’t want to be a teacher anymore. After March 27, every time I think about standing at the front of the classroom, I imagine the faces of thirty kids staring back at me, and I know that the weight of their lives is in my hands. Not just the weight of their minds but the weight of their beating hearts.
I don’t want to be a teacher if that means having to wield a gun with twenty-four hours of training – compared to the 300 hours of training to be a teacher. I don’t want to be a teacher in a world that won’t protect my students or me.
I believe in gun control. Sure, I believe that individuals incite violence, but much more violence can be done with an AR-15 than with a knife, no matter how many people try to tell me that guns are not a problem.
According to “The Gun Violence Archive,” over 4,000 mass shootings have occurred in the past ten years. These numbers almost doubled between 2018 and 2020, going from 336 shootings in 2018 to 610 in 2020. Operational definitions are important, so I will clarify what qualifies a mass shooting. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a mass shooting is when one or more individuals are “actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area.” The number of deaths does not matter, as many who have attempted to downplay the number of shootings have claimed.
An argument against gun control is that bad people don’t follow the laws, meaning that gun control won’t do anything. Here are some facts:
Audrey Hale purchased the gun used in the Nashville shooting completely legally.
Payton Gendren purchased the gun used in the 2023 Buffalo, New York shooting legally at a supermarket two weeks before the shooting.
Salvador Ramos purchased the guns used in the 2022 Robb Elementary School shooting legally just days after his eighteenth birthday.
The number of guns manufactured in the United States has increased drastically in the past decade. Alongside it: the drastic increase in mass shootings. 7,011,945 guns were produced in 2019. In 2021 there were a total of 13,802,787. This is over a 96% increase in gun manufacturing in two years. Coincidentally the number of mass shootings went from 415 in 2019 to 690 in 2021 (still the highest amount of mass shootings in a year to date).
A frequent argument is that gun control will not affect the number of mass shootings because evil people will always break the law. According to these arguments, bad people will always be able to get guns. A statistical study by Giffords Law Center compared the number of mass shootings per state to the strictness of their gun laws. This study showed an inverse correlation, meaning that the stricter the rules in a state, the fewer mass shootings have occurred there.
Another argument is that there has never been an example of increased gun control or decreased gun manufacturing working in a nation. This is simply not true. America has the highest amount of guns per capita (120.5), nearly doubling its next competitor, the Falkland Islands (62.1). In England, the number of guns per capita is 4.6, and they have some of the strictest gun control policies in the entire world. Just a reminder that the number of mass shootings in the United States since 2014 is over 4,000. There have been seven in the United Kingdom between 2010 and now. Another country with strict gun control laws is Greece. The last massacre that occurred in Greece was in 1994.
No one is saying that we are getting rid of guns completely. That isn’t what gun control means to most people utilizing the term. But there is a direct correlation between gun control legislation and lower amounts of gun violence. Ignoring these facts is killing our children.
So, no. I don’t want to be a teacher anymore. Not until we value our children more than our guns.