When Gun Days Begin to Outnumber Snow Days

A lot of folks went to bed nervous on April 16, wondering what schools were going to be doing in light of armed-and-dangerous Florida woman Sol Pais[1] making a “pilgrimage” to the site of the Columbine massacre for the twenty-year memorial. The solution for most Denver-area and foothill schools was to close in advance, and Arapahoe Community College[2] made the same call at about 7 a.m. the morning of April 17 while Pais was still considered at-large. We had a gun day.This is the first gun day I’ve ever experienced. There have been lockdown drills[3] nationwide, mostly for iGeneration-aged students. There have been bomb threats and active-shooter warnings to close down individual schools. There have been, of course, additional massacres, which as a nation we’ve come to accept as just a part of our collective reality. Mostly, our legislative bodies offer thoughts and prayers and angry people get angrier about gun-control advocates having the audacity to exist in their world, where their rifles are worth more than any human life and they cannot wait to tell you and anyone who will listen. They can’t even wait until the students gunned down in a different school in a different town have even been identified by their newly bereaved parents. They flock to the Internet to crow about the arsenal they keep in their kitchen because slave-owners from the 1700s thought muskets were the height of technology and the ready access to them needed to be enshrined. Oh, also? They show up en masse to vote for any politician who can say “Second Amendment” with an earnest smile, regardless of whatever else they might stand for. So long as the NRA slaps a bumper sticker on some millionaire’s back, rest assured that empty suit will draw about half the vote. Because this

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