T HE question no longer is, will it happen again?
The only mystery that remains is, when?
And also, how young?
And, how many more will be maimed?
Each morning we wake up in this armed camp called America, a place where your average school-age child can get his hands on a deadly weapon more easily than he can grasp a textbook.
Each evening, we look nervously at the television news, a frightening landscape where the fact of children shooting children no longer holds the power to shock.
Yesterday, it was Oklahoma. Twelve- and 13-year-old children screaming in a schoolyard. Bleeding. Crying. Mowed down like caged animals. No place to run.
Before Oklahoma it was Colorado. And Arkansas. And Kentucky. And Mississippi. And Oregon.
Tomorrow, it will be someplace else. You can bank on it.
It is peace time in America, but you would never know it. Not when the safe havens where we send our children each day come under assault from within.
The events no longer are isolated, but common. The carnage has become nearly routine. And it is our fault.
In this great nation, we are sacrificing our children’s bodies for a principle. We’d rather risk having our children slaughtered than abandon a single gun.
And as sure as another child, somewhere today, will buy, borrow or steal a gun, it will happen again. And soon.
In great tracts of this country, a child can be expected to learn to fire a gun before he can legally vote, drive a car, or shave his face.
He can shoot before he’s old enough to spend time in adult prison.
In many regions of this nation, a child can receive a gun for his birthday even before he can walk.
“People always say, ‘It happens out in the heartland where you’d least expect it.’ Well, the other side of that is: it’s happening in the places where gun control is most lax,” said Peter Reinharz, the city’s hard-nosed chief Family Court prosecutor.
“In the city, they’re looking for you if you have a gun. There may be violence here, but the one thing we see in shooting after mass shooting is they take place where they have the most guns. It’s common sense.”
America, once considered the freest, most prosperous nation on earth, is now looked upon as the nation where children die for no reason. We allow this to happen. In fact, we make sure of it, every day we stick our head in the sand.
There is a reason we don’t normally see schoolyard shootings and office shootings in a city like New York, so unfairly maligned as a violent town. Here, guns are controlled, and firearms are not as embedded in the culture as in suburban Colorado, or rural Oklahoma.
Yet the gun lovers shout at the tops of their lungs that gun control will solve nothing. Guns don’t kill people, they say, people kill people.
Well, truth is, people with guns kill people.
We can spend time hunting for root causes: movies, television, computers, divorce. But it should be as plain as the Oklahoma landscape that if the shooter did not have access to a firearm, there would be five fewer students recovering from gunshot wounds.
The states award licenses to drivers of cars. They license barbers. Even massage therapists must pass tests to ply their trades.
So even if you abhor the thought of reducing the number of guns in circulation, why not at least license the owners of guns? Make gun ownership contingent on passing a test. Keep track of the firearms in circulation.
And, at all costs, keep them out of the hands of children.
“Nobody would say a 12- or 14-year-old should drive a car on I-95,” Reinharz said. “And that’s a whole lot less dangerous, I don’t care if it’s a handgun, a shotgun or a rifle.”
When something is so obvious, why are so many so blind?