Let me give you a little context on my reaction to the murders in Newtown, Connecticut.
This kind of shooting puts me on edge. Not just because I watched a major one unfold on TV when I was pregnant with my first child. Not just because when the big school shooting before that happened, one of my fellow grad students told me, “That’s where I’m from.” Not just because someone I’ve known since I was a kid is married to a survivor of another. Not just because I freaked out waiting to get word about whether two of my friends from grad school were safe when the university that hired them became the site of another mass killing.
Although all of that, surely, would have been enough.
No, this kind of news puts me right on the edge because of a particular day I had a few years ago.
One of the students in our department left a note on the whiteboard in our conference room that was not quite right. In fact, one of the other students conveyed concern about this note, as it kind of sounded like an expression of intent to return to the department with a gun to “solve” a lot of “problems”. The student who raised these concerns was very apologetic — almost sheepish — in doing so, but there were already concerns about this student. And there was very good reason to believe this student had access to a gun. So, our department chair called campus police to ask what we should do, and found out that the “shooter on campus” drill was scheduled for the very next day which meant they hadn’t yet figured out what the standard response to this kind of threat was going to be. So, probably it would be best for everyone in the department to pack up for the day and go home.
At my department chair’s urging, I packed up and went home. I walked to the on-site after school program where my kids were at our elementary school, signed them out and, on the walk home, asked them how their school day was. They proceeded to tell me what their teachers had done with their classes while the school was on lockdown.
While the school was on lockdown.
Because that very day, when a student in my department at my university was maybe considering coming back with a gun to shoot at us, my kids’ elementary school was locked down because someone with a gun was on its campus. As it turned out, he wasn’t there to shoot students, teachers, or staff — he was merely cutting across campus with a gun on his way to a nearby apartment complex, where he went on to murder his spouse and a neighbor.
So when experts talk about how rare mass shootings, especially mass shootings at schools, are in the grand scheme of things, I feel the need to point out that they are not nearly rare enough. It is easy enough for people with guns to get in shooting distance of me and my kids that I got to experience two near misses in the same damn day.
This suggests to me an overabundance of access to weaponry combined with a remarkable lack of imagination about other ways to deal with frustrations of various sorts. That’s a problem that we really need to fix, and soon.
(Also, read Stephanie’s post on peculiar problems with U.S. gun culture that it’s time to take on.)
I’ve written to my representatives asking for mandated gun insurance, same as mandated auto insurance. It takes away no one’s “right” to own a weapon, but it should sure make it more bureaucratic and expensive, particularly for slaughter weapons like the ones the shooter had access to.
Plus, it would encourage responsible gun owners to “lower their rates” by taking key safety measures, like locking up guns, or installing the so-called “smart gun” locks that only allow the owner to use the weapon, with an RFID ring or similar. This type of protection would go a long ways towards reducing accidental death, particularly child death, which is in fact the biggest risk these firearms pose.
Similarly, gun insurance would be way more expensive for the highest at-risk group (single men ages 18-25, same as car insurance, NOT coincidentally), as well as for people who had, say, children at home or who had a record of a previous accident.
And, much like ACA, a giant boon for the insurance industry, which would probably be good for the economy too. Win-win-win.