by Ashley Surber
Within these first 7 weeks of 2018, there have been 18 mass shootings. If you responded similarly to me, you probably had feelings of astonishment. How have that many innocent people suffered from such an untimely death, with not much explanation or understanding? We grasp the concept that death occurs, that it happens in many different ways, but we still have yet to understand the kind of death that occurs out of this type of anger or darkness.
The most recent of these types of events was the high school shooting in Parkland, Florida, where 17 people lost their lives. Some gave their lives in the place of others, some were unable to escape the horrific actions that were happening inside that school, and because of this, they were not able to return home from school that day.
A day of love, turned to a day of destruction, not only for those who passed but for those who will now live with the terrors of this traumatic event. Every person in that high school, each person who has been involved in any of the shootings in 2018 and the years passed, will now live in a reality stagnated by fear and a realization that it could’ve been them.
I write this to ask, when will our response change? When will we begin to alleviate the pain and grief that occurs in the aftermath? When will we begin to settle for more than just a blame on stricter gun control, on putting a better system in place? When will we begin to ask ourselves what we can do better, and how we can do that together?
We now live in a world where we have to practice active- shooter drills, where the topic of classroom teachers having guns in their possession is discussed. We have grown more comfortable in dealing with the effects than the cause. How does this make you want to do better and to seek better precautionary action?
After our President addressed the nation today, questions were then taken by a White House Representative. The extent of the matter of mental health and how that pertains to these types of events, was briefly touched on, saying that the matter pertained to a piece of legislation sitting in the senate, waiting to either be denied or passed through, and then what? We watch as this issue of mental health destructs the homes of thousands through trauma and death. We see it destroy communities, who then have to rebuild and start over with even heavier safety precautions because they can’t imagine suffering from a similar situation in the future. They lose beloved students and teachers and coaches. They bear this weight for years and years to come.
When are we going to finally tell ourselves it has been enough, that enough should’ve been enough a long time ago? Gun control will not cure the minds of the ill, and the ill cannot become normally functioning citizens when their needs are denied or even unrecognized and when we are not fully educated on how to help them out of the darkness they sadly suffer from. We are surrounded by individuals who are prone to act out in this way whether it is prevalent or not. When their instability then translates to violence, we ask ourselves how they managed to obtain a weapon and peg them as psychopaths. What we tend to only ask ourselves after that is what could have been done to prevent it? We should not blame it on the fact that a stack of papers is sitting in a branch of the U.S. government waiting to be acted upon. How could anyone place blame away pertaining something like this? We all have a part to play, and abilities that can aid in resolving this type of behavior. We need immediate results, that we are aching for in the here and now.
Our country is hurting. Our people are hurting. The system is hurting. Our methods are incomplete and not strategically accurate in helping those that are aching beneath the seams. We allow them to slip through the cracks and as these shootings continue to occur we continue to ask ourselves the same questions, assuming we will get a different answer. Let us mourn for the losses of many, but let us also act now in hopes for a day where we no longer lose innocent lives in their place of learning or for that matter, anywhere else.