Our first two children were born through emergency Cesarean sections, scary moments that ushered them into the world.
Our oldest, now on the cusp of 16 years old, was tinged blue in his first moments outside the womb as neonatologists worked to help him breathe. His heart rate fluctuated just before the C-section, and the doctors were afraid he might have an infection after being stuck during more than 40 hours of labor.
Our second son’s umbilical cord started tearing away during labor, so he had to be born soon after we arrived at the hospital. The decision to do a C-section was so sudden that my flustered wife nearly punched the anesthesiologist until he and the doctors paused a moment to explain the situation.
Even if their births had gone smoothly—our youngest child, our daughter, was born much more calmly—I know that parental instinct to fiercely protect them from their first hours onward still would have kicked in. It’s natural, an imprinted behavior in many animals, to do anything to save your offspring.
That doesn’t matter to someone with a life-destroying gun, however. Earlier this week, on Valentine’s Day, a young man with an AR-15—it’s almost always an AR-15 these days—killed 17 people, mostly students, inside a big Florida high school. Parkland, Fla., now is added to a grisly, heartbreaking list.
This one isn’t the most deadly school shooting ever. Its victims aren’t the youngest ever in the U.S., either. But many of my friends are saying “this is the one that’s broken me.” I feel that, too. So many mass shootings, so many victims, so little done in their wake.
On the morning of Valentine’s Day, hours before the Florida shooting happened, we got an email from the principal at our oldest son’s high school. Rumors of violence had circulated around the school; the principal reported reassuringly they had been investigated. That same day, the local newspaper told the story of a young man in neighboring Everett who had planned to shoot up his school. His grandmother read his journal and found he’d hidden an AK-47 in a guitar case, so she called police and foiled her grandson’s plot. It’s not just in Florida; it’s close to home.
I’m sure our school district, a good one, does what it can. My kids talk about the “incident drills” they do. My 10-year-old boy and 8-year-old girl know vaguely why they have those drills. I quietly wonder if those drills will actually save them if the worst happens.
And that’s the devastating part. If it happens, we won’t be able to do anything for our children. As they’ve grown up, we’ve taught them to look both ways when crossing streets, to wear bike helmets, to buckle their seat belts. We’ve tried to protect them while also allowing them to test their freedom. We’ve fretted about them getting into drugs or struggling with depression or anxiety as they get older. We even have asked their friends’ parents about whether they keep guns around. But how do you protect them from a determined mass shooter?
Two of my oldest son’s classmates have committed suicide with guns during the past 10 months. Three of the worst mass shootings in U.S. history—Las Vegas; Sutherland Springs, Texas; and now Parkland—have happened during the past six months. And yet, nothing happens to start correcting this. I’ve largely given up on arguing this on social media because it seems hopeless. Politicians, the NRA and gun rights advocates loudly oppose even the most mild, widely supported steps toward curbing mass shootings: banning bump stocks, which were used in the Las Vegas massacre; banning the AR-15, if not all assault weapons; getting a consistent background check system. Nothing will work, they say. We need more help for the mentally ill, they say. I agree on that latter point, but it’s hard to better help the mentally ill when budgets for that help are cut.
The Congressional Research Service has reported in recent years there are probably now more guns than people in the U.S. I believe it. Yet the answer so many on the other side of the issue propose is that we need even more guns. Arming teachers and transforming our schools into fortresses are offered as the solutions du jour.
On the day after the Florida shooting, I drove my teen up the hill to his high school, as he often moves too slowly in the morning to walk to school before the first bell rings. I kept the radio off, as I didn’t want to start his day or mine with news of the shooting. Instead, as the traffic bunched up near the entrance to the high school parking lot, we ended up right behind a vehicle with the spare tire cover in the photo with this piece: an American flag with assault rifle drawings replacing the stripes. It was a too-perfect metaphor.
And so it goes. And more people, including children, die. And us parents rage and plead for something, anything, to be done before our children are next. I’m tired of this cycle, but it seems endless, no matter how hard we want it to stop. It just doesn’t stop.
(The photo comes from www.gruntstyle.com, which sells this tire cover. I believe in crediting photo sources, but that's not an endorsement.)