No American School Can Promise Our Children’s Safety

My two-year-old still thinks if he can’t see us, we can’t see him. When we play hide-and-seek, he turns away, shields his eyes, and waits, rigid with barely contained giggles.

I thought about this in late September as a preschool admissions director toured us through tidy classrooms painted cobalt and lime green. Jack was younger than the age I ever wanted to put him in daycare, but we started the year with fifteen hours of home childcare, which decreased to nine over the summer, and then none. Nine hours of childcare doesn’t sound like much until you lose it, and with it the minimal time to work and simply inhabit space in your own mind. Still, I felt guilty. Our daughter, after all, didn’t start “school” until she was three. Yet she was so much happier for it.

I tried to quiet my uncertainty as the director showed us the cucumber bush the children planted in the spring, the AstroTurf splash pad for unforgiving Texas summers. Jack wrapped his fingers around the gate to the smaller playground, watched kids stumble and slide. A teacher bounced a crying baby in the shade.

There was one front door and one back door, the director explained as we made our way back to the building. They could only be opened by biometric individualized fingerprint access. (Unaware of this, I had stepped right in after parents dropping off their kids.)

“We do practice active-shooter drills,” she said, letting us inside. “We don’t call them that, of course. We turn off all the lights and ‘play hide-and-seek.’”

Jack clutched my hand, lips pursed around the thick straw of his Baby Shark water cup. And I imagined him then, my little boy turning to a wall in a dark room, believing himself invisible. Little eager puffs of breath that would smell like apple-strawberry fruit pouches. A locked door and two terrified teachers saying, “Shh. Shh. Remember, we have to be quiet.” At some point there would be confusing noises outside the classroom, jarring and close. Jack would drop his hands, turn around. “Agua,” he would say firmly, an instinctive desire for the comfort of his sippy cup. Louder: “Mama.”

It takes so little to hurt them at this age. Jack tripped once, didn’t catch himself in time, and his chin split on the floor. Blood covered his face and clothes, bright as jam. All the efforts to make our house safe—the socket covers and table bumpers, the baby monitors and bath mats—and he just . . . fell. At urgent care, a doctor glued the edges of his wound together as if he were a broken toy. To picture him “hiding” from the kind of destruction a gun would do to his body—I could hardly bear to finish the tour. I already knew I wouldn’t enroll him. Not because the school practiced active-shooter drills, but because they’re both necessary and useless. They acknowledge the monster. That’s all.

I already knew I wouldn’t enroll him. Not because the school practiced active-shooter drills, but because they’re both necessary and useless.

There is no school in America that can promise a child’s safety from gunfire. Then again, neither can churches, grocery stores, parades, Walmarts, or any other public space. But in that moment, faced with the prospect of my toddler training for an active shooter, all I wanted to do—because I could—was take him home.

*

On May 26, my four-year-old daughter was in her prekinder class when a push notification caught my attention: There was an active shooter at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, only an hour and a half from us. I was home with Jack as the news was updated in real time. I kept telling him brightly, “Mommy will be right back!” so I could walk into different rooms and cry. Later, I learned that three friends of a friend lost their nine-year-old daughters that day.

I follow some of the Uvalde parents, mostly mothers, on Twitter. They are open wounds of grief and rage. One mother blames herself, again and again, for not taking her daughter home earlier, after the end-of-year awards ceremony. She addresses her daughter directly, apologizes for not protecting her. There are families that had planned to leave Uvalde, or would leave now, except their children are buried there so they won’t, and I understand. I wouldn’t leave my children either.

I scroll and like and donate and cry until my head hurts for all the ways these kids were failed, all the ways all our kids are failed. I’ve listened to the 911 calls, watched interviews, kept up with the parents’ protests and lawsuits and testimonies before Congress. “You fucked with the wrong parents,” they repeat, and I believe them.

*

I grew up in South Texas, where fall marks the start of hunting season: September is javelina, October is quail, November is whitetail. My dad in a dusty camo jacket, smelling like sun and metal and mesquite—when we saw guns, they were in his hands, and he taught us to respect them the way we were taught to respect anything that could hurt us: kitchen scissors, the pocketknife he sometimes left on his dresser, cars driving down our street as we rode bikes. In our house, guns were locked inside the tall, glossy, immovable safe in my parents’ closet.

My siblings and I could never stomach the idea of hunting, but I’ve always respected my dad’s use of deer or pig meat. Sometimes he gives it to ranch hands. Other times he slow roasts it. He shreds it and mixes it with diced tomato, onion, and avocado, drenches it with lime before refrigerating it, and we eat the salpicón on tortilla chips, standing around the kitchen island. He dries it into different kinds of jerky, black pepper and lemon pepper, cidered and smoked, and offers it to us each time we visit.

These days when my dad hunts, my husband and brother-in-law go with him. My husband is from Australia, which dramatically overhauled its gun laws in 1996, after a man in Port Arthur, Tasmania, killed thirty-five people and wounded twenty-three others in the deadliest mass shooting since the last official sanctioned massacre of Indigenous Australians in 1928. Four days after Port Arthur, Prime Minister John Howard told Parliament, “We need to achieve a total prohibition on the ownership, possession, sale and importation of all automatic and semi-automatic weapons.”

Anticipating the potential backlash by law-abiding gun owners, particularly in rural communities, Howard said he understood how passionately people felt about this issue but that he placed his faith in Australia’s willingness to create a “profound cultural shift” around guns.

“Perhaps if we do that as a community,” he said, “we can avoid some of the trauma experienced almost as a daily fact of life in the United States. I would hate to contemplate the future of this country if we went willy-nilly down the American path when it came to gun violence.”

Reading this statement twenty-six years later, my heart aches deep. Our future, the one we are living, was not inevitable. It was chosen. It is an ongoing choice.

Twelve days after the massacre, Australia passed the National Firearms Agreement, which included tight restrictions on semiautomatic and fully automatic weapons, a gun registry, and mandated waiting periods, as well as a national buyback program that peacefully collected and destroyed more than 650,000 privately owned guns, or an estimated 20 to 30 percent of the country’s firearms. Since then, there have been only two mass shootings in Australia involving four or more people (one of which, terribly, was a domestic violence incident). In 2019, 229 people in Australia died by gun violence, compared to 39,707 in the US. Adjusted for population, that’s one Australian death for every thirteen of ours.

My husband, Adrian, grew up in Sydney, but his family is from rural Queensland. The only time he had access to guns was when they visited his uncle’s 70,000-acre working sheep station. When he moved to Texas in 2014, he couldn’t believe how ubiquitous they are. There’s a shooting range two miles from our house that promotes events like “The Well-Armed Woman Shooting Chapter Meeting,” “Bucks and Brews Guys Night,” and a “Gun Range Birthday Party”—for kids. You can buy guns at Walmart and Academy, where they’re displayed like jewelry inside a glass case and all it takes is a ten-minute record check. Homes bear signs reading “Protected by Smith and Wesson.”

Guns are entrenched in the culture of this state perhaps even more than the culture of this country. Texans whose roots here extend back far enough inherit the mythology of this land: harsh, embattled, relinquished, reclaimed. For many Texans, guns are a symbol of defiance and independence, of willingness to fight and defend. It’s been this way for as long as I can remember. But in the last ten or fifteen years, something here has shifted.

I was a sophomore in 1999, when twelve students and one teacher were killed by gunfire at Columbine High School, with another twenty-one people injured. At the time, it was the deadliest high school shooting in US history and the first I remember even knowing about. It was a jagged tear through the fabric of our presumed safety in public places.

Still, however horrifying, the idea of a mass shooter—at school or anywhere else—was still an aberration. Of course, gun violence existed. The US, as Australia knew even in 1996, has always had a gun problem. In 2002, the year I graduated high school, more than thirty thousand Americans died from gun violence. But there was not yet a need to teach two-year-olds how to hide from men with assault rifles. As I see it now, I grew up in the last years of innocence. My children are inheriting a different country, a different state.

Texas has had eight mass shootings—defined as killing four or more people, not including the murderer—in the last thirteen years, compared to seven in the previous thirty-five years. In the most recent mass shootings alone, 118 people died and another 152 were injured. A microcosm of victims: an entire family of eight, including children and a pregnant mother, attending First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs; a young couple who died shielding their two-month-old baby at Walmart in El Paso; soldiers in Fort Hood preparing to deploy to Afghanistan and Iraq; and of course children—so many children. In 2019, there were 3,683 gun deaths in Texas, including 388 children and teens under nineteen.

As I see it now, I grew up in the last years of innocence. My children are inheriting a different country, a different state.

Meanwhile, since 2010, the state’s gun laws have kept loosening, making it illegal for employers to prohibit employees from keeping firearms in their cars at work, allowing people with gun licenses to open carry, requiring public universities to allow campus carry, and allowing anyone twenty-one or older to publicly carry handguns without a permit or training. Over the same time period, gun deaths in Texas have increased by 16 percent.

In 2020, guns became the leading cause of death for children and teenagers in the US, ahead of accidents, congenital malformations, and cancer, a sentence so horrifying it should stand by itself.

According to the Gun Violence Archive, an independent data collection and research group that collects daily data from over 7,500 law enforcement, media, government, and commercial sources, as of December 2, there have been 618 mass shootings in the US this year alone. As of this writing, 40,754 Americans have died by gun violence in 2022. Another 35,955 people have been injured.

Forty thousand seven hundred and fifty-four: That’s one-sixth of my hometown; if the losses continue at the same rate, in the next five years the population equivalent of the entire city of Laredo, Texas—or Scottsdale, Arizona; or Spokane, Washington; or Reno, Nevada—will be shot dead in this country. Double these numbers to include the injured. Quintuple them to account for immediate family and friends impacted by the loss or injury of someone they love. That would make, extremely modestly, 350,000 people—more than one in one thousand Americans—directly impacted by gun violence every single year. Indirectly? All of us.

*

A month after Uvalde, President Biden signed into law a bipartisan gun-safety package—the first major gun-safety legislation in almost thirty years—which included incentives for states to pass red-flags laws, closed the so-called “boyfriend loophole,” and expanded background checks for people between eighteen and twenty-one trying to buy a gun. Additionally, 140 volunteers from Moms Demand Action, a grassroots gun-safety-advocacy organization that mother Shannon Watts founded after Sandy Hook, recently won office across the country, with some flipping seats in previously Republican-held districts.

This country is broken. Deeply, foundationally, but—I have to believe—not irreparably. It’s not enough to acknowledge the monster, to merely accept it as a cost of living in the United States. It’s not enough to teach our children to hide.

I keep thinking there has to be a sea change coming. A swollen wave on the horizon, pulled from the inkiest depths, fueled by the rage of ordinary people—parents whose babies hid and suffered and died, who are harnessing the power of their ferocious broken hearts to push for laws that will keep everyone safer; people whose friends were gunned down dancing, shopping, worshipping, because of a terrible festering hate; grandparents raising grandchildren because their own are in the ground. All of us who feel, who know, we deserve the right to live in public without terror of slaughter. All of us who lie beside our children at night stroking round cheeks silvered by moonlight, thanking the spirits we thank for giving us another day without needing to identify them by their shoes. All of us who know there is another way to live, and we know because people in other places are living it.

• 0