This gentleman is spot on. Simply yet deeply shared the logic behind his actions.
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1993509594242800&id=100007513365065
Response to above linked eir
I'm speechless. Wow am I grateful people like this gentleman exist.
Please America, let's look deeper and lay off the blame game. Do we really want to keep paying off our 'freedom' with the blood of children? Of our very own family and friends?
I remember the Columbine tragedy like it was yesterday. That day and all the days that followed after the shooting has been burned into my mind and heart. Fear, not just rejected by your crush fear, true, raw unyielding fear settled into a deep part of my younger mind. Loud noises became a cause for action. The 'bomb threats' became so familiar that many settled into the new reality writting it all off as seniors wanting a 'half day'.....no longer sent home, the entire school was shuffled out to the fenced football field. The fear skyrocketed. Silent, tension soaked lines of peers and teachers marched out. Was this one real? Was it a drill?
When the teachers were silent and keeping close we knew the fear was deep and the outcomes variable. But what caused the threat onslaught in that little town? It was many hurting, or even jokester, students leaving notes with vage, yet quite real threats. Could this be the day our little town became national news?
I scanned the crowd, the teachers speaking in hushed voices, brimming with a strained duty to protect us. Many of us may never know the weight of such a task. From a teacher to a protector of life. Our lives. Us gathered like cattled feeling quite confused how this makes us safer. We were sitting ducks. We could feel it. In the cold, the rain, the heat we stood and waited. The alert lights still flashing, breaking through the glass panes along the halls and catching our eyes. A subtle reminder, as if we needed one, of our current predicament.
We scanned the crowds looking for our friends, our siblings, even that crush. How strange it became that just that morning , I altered my path to avoid that very crush. "Ugh, they can't see me like this!" When did the fear of rejection and being accepted by our peers become second in our teenage minds?
Sirens would crash through the heavy air. The first few times, the whole fleet would surround our buildings of growth and learning. Now appearing, no, feeling alike, to the battle fields in which 'our country' fought for the freedom to not fear being ourselves. We can speak, pray and bare arms how we wish, without fear....or so we had been taught....yet in those moments i did not feel free. I felt trapped, afraid for us all.
Teenage brains are fragile....would one squeese a clay pot before it was fired, hardened and steady and no longer molding to the pressures of the existence around it? No. The once clay pot would be rendered an unrecognizable glob of wet Earth! As are the minds of children, and even adults. Fear originating from inside and outside stressors, such as the hands collapsing around wet clay, cause great damage to the masterpieces we ourselves had been molding. Our first solo self portraits. Yet we stood in the feild dew seeping into our sneakers, cold rushing through our shirts. (Coats were no longer hung in lockers for the day.) Becoming in absence of air, yet unable to draw complete breath for fear I could miss a sound, a sign, some warning of the thing most feared in that moment. Would I fear my fellow student or would I fear the device which gave them power over the rest of us? The power to not just collapse the clay pot that was our in process identities, but to crush, fire and shatter it to peices. To shatter all of us to pieces. The pieces that will never go home the same, no tragedy can be healed by the simplicity of super glue. How are so many never going home? When did school buses become acceptable in the procession of a funeral? I am lucky. Our town was lucky. The threat never became more than just that. Yet where does this leave us? Where does this leave our children, our nieces, nephews, our grandchildren, our friend's children, the children we've taken to waving to as our ride home from work includes a slow yellow bus which always seems to land ahead....the same bus which has instigated mumbled curse words from our mouths. What happens when tragedy hit close and the 'vein of our existence', that silly yellow bus no longer carries that smiling child who never gave up till you waved? Have we not failed our younger selves? Have we not failed each other? Is a personal gun really worth the fear it Sparks? The possibilities it holds. People exist in layers upon layers of possibility. Guns are guns. They were birthed to accomplish death or destruction. Yes, some take life to gift sustenance. Yet if that's the goal the options are plentyful. There will always be hunters, there will always be violence yet there needs not be a tool which would destroy the hinted meat and exist soley for Mass destruction. Do we need guns as protection if we work together towards a world with less fear? Wouldn't that focus bring a deeper more sustaining existence for those who come after us? Just because Solutions are difficult and may take a couple generations to fully be realized, does not mean that they are not the most important efforts that we who exists Now can do to leave our homes safer. For even those of us who feel protected, powerful in the defense of our families, with a gun toweild... we will not be here to protect our children and loved ones forever. It's time to look deeper and ask ourselves what's more important. Life or the illusion of protecting the life or lives we deem most important?
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