By Rebecca Do
“Mass shootings have reached a record high in the past couple of years.”
How many times have you heard that?
We’re no strangers to the gun violence epidemic in this country. At Fountain Valley High School, we are also no strangers to the (almost routinely) shelter-in-places. 99% percent of the time, it’s not real; it’s just some sad person wanting to live out their delinquent days before the school year ends. But now in this age where people are dying every day from guns and where school shootings are becoming quotidian, it makes me wonder how we can continue to let our kids live under these conditions.
June 14.
The graduation ceremony for the class of 2023 will commence on the large, hot turf field at Orange Coast College. There, we can only assume that everyone from the graduating class will be in attendance. Because we were lucky enough to have the shelter-in-places be nothing but shelter-in-places; there were no shootings. Not on this campus. Never on this campus.
But that wasn’t the case for Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. It wasn’t the case for the kids at Santa Fe High School either and it certainly wasn’t the case for the students and faculty of Oxford High School either.
Just like you, these children of Generation Z were taken from the world gruesomely by some freak with a firearm. Some random person who had to pass a background check that anyone could pass, harnessed the power of mortality with a seven-pound machine of mass destruction.
Our leniency to guns and weapons in this country hasn’t gone unnoticed. The “March for Our Lives” movement that stemmed from the 2016 Parkland shooting calls for gun control. Our congressmen call for stricter background checks. Public outrage from scared students, parents, and teachers turns communities upside down. We’ve done the work. We’ve protested. Where do we fail?
Some say the people. Some say the legislation allows said people to own firearms. But I would like to make a bold claim (sarcasm) and state that nobody should be allowed to own a firearm. They are made not to cut food like knives and not made to tie things like rope. A firearm is used for one sole purpose and it is to hurt other people.
But I digress. In two decades, from 2000 to 2020, we’ve lost over 30,000 children to gun violence.
Of course, the students at Fountain Valley High School come out of the school year unscathed. We have not, as a school, been subject to the threat of gun violence. We have not yet, as a community, known the anguish and grief of survivors’ guilt. We have not sat in our classrooms, under our desks and behind shelves, scared for our lives of what is to come in the following minutes. Our parents have never gotten the “if anything happens, I love you” text. But that does not mean we never will.
America has not done anything besides “enforce stricter background checks” on gun sales. But just because America doesn’t care about K-12 public schools does not mean you should not.
I don’t mean to politicize high school graduations. I don’t mean to turn what is basically a coming-of-age ceremony into a day of mourning. But what I do mean to do, is to remind students of all the kids that should have been graduating with them.
I end this with not a call to action but a gentle request. Seniors, when you’re walking onto that podium, clad in your cap and gown and stoles, remember the kids that weren’t able to be in your position.
Remember the shelter-in-places.
Remember the breaking news articles and victims bearing their soul on live television.
Remember Columbine. Remember Parkland. Remember Oxford and Santa Fe and the countless others the media wasn’t able to sensationalize because of how often it happens in this country.
Congratulations on graduating, seniors. Please stay safe.
