When we were children, we sang along to the song School Days, at least at home. My mother was very good at finding records for children, and one of them was School Days. I'm not sure who sang the song we listened to, but the lyrics and music were written in 1907 by Will D. Cobb and Gus Edwards:
School days, school days
Dear old golden rule days
Readin' and 'ritin' and 'rithmetic
Taught to the tune of the hickory stick
You were my queen in calico
I was your bashful barefoot beau
And you wrote on my slate, "I love you, Joe"
When we were a couple of kids
There was no hickory stick to keep us in line when we were schoolchildren, just the Catholic school nuns. One look or word from them and you stopped misbehaving. There was also no rampant social media addiction to warp our minds. I don't know why I was reminded of this song today, perhaps because the reality of school days for children nowadays is anything but innocent and carefree.
I cannot imagine being a parent or grandparent and watching young children go off to school, not knowing if you will see them again. School shootings (and mass shootings in general) have become part of the norm of everyday life and they shouldn't be. There are people I know on Facebook who always post the same thing after a school or other mass shooting--"guns don't kill people, people kill people". It's semantics. Of course guns kill people. If access to those guns wasn't readily available, there wouldn't be guns to kill people. We can argue about the differences between a handgun and an assault rifle. I know that they are not the same. Most of the shootings seem to be done with assault rifles. Why? Because the intent is to kill as many people as possible. There is no other purpose to an assault rifle. You certainly don't need one to riddle a poor animal you're hunting with a barrage of bullets. What's left of the animal after that? If you defend the right to own an assault rifle, you are part of the problem. One solution, perhaps the best, is to ban assault rifles, as they have no place in civilized society. Another is to require thorough extensive background checks on anyone who wants to purchase any type of gun or rifle, period.
Do our senators realize that their children and grandchildren are at risk? Or don't they care? I ask that question because such shootings are unpredictable. They occur in all states, in small towns and in larger cities. Living rurally doesn't protect anyone or hinder such events. Uvalde is proof of that. Another unsettling factor in so many shootings is how the shooters post their intentions or photos of themselves decked out as if for war on social media. What is wrong with our society? Something is definitely pathologically wrong about society's love of guns. If it continues unchecked, there will just be lawlessness and random shootings everywhere in the next ten years.
When we were in grammar school and high school, we were taught how to crouch under our desks in case of an atomic bomb attack. Little good that would have done us. Once a year we may have had that drill. Teachers and parents did not focus on it because such an attack was not a very real threat despite the Cold War and the rhetoric surrounding the use of atomic bombs. Everyone saw the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and decided that such horrific occurrences would never happen again. It can't be so difficult to see the carnage after a mass shooting and ban assault rifles as well as change the laws as to who is competent enough to own a gun. Each life that is saved has incalculable worth. Why are we arguing over this?
