Another school shooting last month, and then yet another last week – and the shooting death of Charlie Kirk. Thoughts and prayers? I can’t even. Kirk died by the sword he lived by, and while I feel compassion for his wife and young children, he deserves none. Women and girls in the state in which he was killed – Utah, an overwhelmingly white, Republican place – are dying, or being flown out of state for basic healthcare due to the policies of male legislators who look and think like this now deceased college drop-out creep. There are many kinds of violence, and one of them is the ongoing violence against women and girls and our right to own our own bodies. More on Kirk another day. Because…
…there’s this side of the ongoing story of gun violence in the U.S., from NPR re: the recent school shooting in Minnesota, and yes, the sound you hear is my head exploding: As a lone shooter carried out a mass shooting that killed two children and injured 15 other children and three adults, children were protecting other children.
“We had one kid that covered up another kid and took a shotgun blast to his back,” Marty Scheerer, chief of Hennepin Emergency Medical Services, said on Thursday.
Bigger kids were able to quickly help little ones in the church because many of them had been paired together in a buddy system, says Michael Burt, a parent whose family has five kids at Annunciation Catholic School. He says it’s a tradition at the school, meant to help younger students learn how to get around the campus, and how to behave during services.
“So for instance, seventh graders get, say, a third and a first grader, and they walk to church, school Mass, with each buddy [holding] a hand, and they sit next to them in church, teach them how to do church,” he says.
Then someone started shooting.
“The first action by those middle schoolers was to push their buddies down under the pew,” Burt says. “Which is why the middle schoolers were the ones that were standing the longest and were largely the injured, acting in heroism … and then covering the little ones under the pews.”
This, ladies and gentlemen, is America, 2025.
Since the shooting at Columbine High School in 1999, 26 years ago, nearly 400,000 American children have experienced gun violence and concomitant trauma while at school. Kids being killed or severely injured includes the deep, life-long injury being done to many other children who have lived through the absolute horror of seeing their friends, classmates and trusted adults being shot and killed around them, or of having to hide in complete terror in what should be a safe place, as gunshots ring out in their school.
In the U.S. and the U.S. alone, it’s an epidemic. It is a political, moral, and collective failure of us all – of us all – that hundreds of thousands of children have lived through this uniquely American ‘style’ of violence while at the same time efforts to enact basic gun safety laws to protect them continue to be stymied.
The rate of gun violence in the U.S. is so high, so consistently high, that since 2020, it has been the leading cause of death for children and adolescents, surpassing car accidents for the first time since data and records have been kept. Also notable, the U.S. is an extreme outlier among developed nations; our a gun homicide rate is 77 times higher than Germany and 33 times higher than Australia. It’s the guns. It’s the guns. It’s the guns.
Even basic gun safety laws widely supported by the public – universal background checks, red flag laws, and strict restrictions on weapons manufactured for use in war – have been blocked time and again in Congress because the vast majority of Republicans have prioritized campaign contributions from the gun lobby over the lives of our children.
We don’t have to live this way.
UNLIKE CONGRESS, following the murder of 20 children at their elementary school in Newtown, Ct. one mom, Shannon Watts, had had enough, starting the organization, Moms Demand Action. MDA joined together with others working to end gun violence to form a non-profit organization, Everytown for Gun Safety, which is now a movement of nearly 11 million parents, gun violence survivors, gun owners, elected officials, and others committed to standing up to the gun lobby and fighting for our kids, theirs and all of those impacted by gun violence in this country.
If you want to get involved nationally or with a local chapter or to donate to support Everytown for Gun Safety, do so at https://everytown.org
We can do better.