Get rid of your guns, you f*cking lunatics

This morning, I dropped my kids off at school.

I kissed them goodbye (largely against their will), I hugged them tightly and then watched as they ran off happily into their classrooms, where I knew that the worst thing that would happen to them would be a grazed knee in the playground, a bump of the head playing chase, or, god forbid, contracting yet another round of COVID.

Then I got in the car, drove myself back home, and I sat in my car and cried at the news.

Yesterday, nineteen children were shot dead at a school in Texas, America.

The shooter (who I’m not glorifying by bothering to find out his name) was then shot dead by the police.

Nineteen children, the exact same age as my own two, and two of their teachers have had their lives wiped out at the whim of an angry teenager with a semi-automatic weapon that he probably had obtained entirely legally. The worst part of the whole tragedy is that this is something that we’re almost used to hearing now.

We are 22 weeks into 2022, and there have been 27 school shootings so far this year in America.

Twenty seven.

Twenty seven schools whose teachers, pupils, families and wider community will never, ever be the same again.

And that’s just shooting in schools; these horrific murders in Texas have come just ten days after a mass shooting at a supermarket in New York which took the lives of ten people.

Mass shootings in America are now so commonplace, they share a tally on a Wikipedia page. So far this year there have been 202 shootings leaving 221 dead and 790 injured.

I struggle to comprehend it entirely.

When I try to understand it, I can’t keep the tears in.

Fortunately for parents in the UK and across the world, we don’t have to worry about the risk of dropping our babies off at school and never seeing them again, because the average man (and it does always seem to be men) on the street mercifully doesn’t have ready access to guns.

It happened once, in Dunblane on 13 March 1996. I was 12 years old. After sixteen children and one teacher were killed, gun laws were changed and the UK has not seen anything similar since then.

However, America just won’t budge.

For one of the richest countries in the world, America seems to everyone outside of it to be so very backwards.

Republicans oppose providing basic health and social care for the poorest families, but are more than happy to let them risk gunshot wounds when they’re out shopping.

And earlier this month, a very vocal minority of anti-choice protesters all came out in support of the Supreme Court’s draft decision to overturn of Roe v Wade; a move which would set America back 50 years in terms of reproductive rights.

These people fight vociferously to ensure that unwanted babies are born into families unable to look after them. They actively campaign to remove a woman’s right to choose; they want to force all pregnancies to come to term regardless of the circumstances, but in direct contrast of their so called ‘pro-life’ status they are happy to let those same babies, whose lives were just so damn precious in the womb that the mother didn’t even matter, enter into a world where being shot to death at school is a real risk – and is so now so common they have to undertake regular active shooter drills* as part of their normal curriculum.

I know that right wing NRA nuts really love their shooty toys but nothing is worth that, even if your penis is tiny and no one loves you.

The right to bear arms is apparently more important to US lawmakers than the right for kids not to get brutally murdered at school and I am definitely not here for it.

I will never, ever understand the obsession. Just…Get rid of the damn guns. You don’t need them.

The rest of the world manages perfectly well without. We don’t need them as self-defence against criminals with guns because they don’t have them either. As a reward, we don’t go to the supermarket and worry that someone will open fire while we’re doing the weekly shop. We don’t drop our kids off at school each day and worry that they’ll be brutally killed.

At the very least, bring in much stricter controls so that angry teenagers who would otherwise put their surge in testosterone into sport or maybe punching a wall can’t get hold of fucking murder machines. It has to change.

*If you really want to cry, read this thread. Fucking harrowing.