On Sunday, Aug. 26, a disgruntled young man shot 11 people and killed two because he’d lost a video game. Every politician, Republican and Democratic, who allows for deadly firearms to be an easily purchasable commodity is an accomplice to those murders.
As a young citizen of the United States of America, I am no longer giving the benefit of the doubt to politicians and elected representatives who are responsible for the deaths of so many young people in this country, and who have refused to take action to stop meaningless and unbearable murders. As a nation we must face the reality that the decisions to approve the laws surrounding the sale of firearms in the U.S. and uphold the second amendment and interpret it broadly are the decisions that have led to the unrelenting murder of children as young as one and folks as old as 90.
In Parkland, Fla., we saw that all it took was a boy who was dissatisfied with his social and love life to murder 14 teenagers. Teenagers who were stripped of their chance to make an impact in the world, love spouses and raise children. They will never have that chance simply because our laws permit the commercial exchange of killing machines, and we so poorly enforce regulations regarding who can carry them and who they are sold to after-market.
I was always been a fairly anxious kid. Starting in second grade or so, I would either choose or request a seat in the classroom where I was far from the door or window and where I could easily see both. It doesn’t take Oprah Winfrey-like levels of empathy to understand why an 8-year-old shouldn’t
