My mom is an art teacher and this is the first year that teachers at her school have been required to complete training exercises in preparation for a school shooting. The school district where I grew up started similar training when I was in junior high, not long after Columbine. Along with regular fire drills, we had to practice how to fortify our classrooms against the possibility of one of our own wreaking havoc out of the seeming blue. I, for one, took it very seriously as I had encountered a classmate with a gun once (to this day I don't know if it was real or fake, but not being one of those colorful water guns, I didn't waste any time in telling my teacher).
Then I went abroad. In whichever country I happen to be in, no matter how developed or (usually) underdeveloped it is, one of the first questions I get is whether it's true that everyone in the U.S. owns a gun. If it's not that question, it's whether or not it's true that people can walk around in public with a gun. I know how we Americans would like to answer these questions. It would be very grand to respond with a vigorous, "No!" While you can't judge the whole situation based on the regular reports of shootings that make it to the front page, we can't ignore the true answer to these questions. The answer is "yes," I'm sad to report. Yes, people can carry a gun in public places. Although restrictions apply depending on where you intend to carry the firearm or whether or not it's loaded, it remains true that only 6 states and the District of Columbia forbid carrying firearms at all. Furthermore, the law is not the same in all states. Of course, not everyone owns a gun. But according to some statistics 1 in 4 people do. Huffington Post's graphic on the topic points out an interesting comparison. While China doesn't even have 10 guns per 100 people, the U.S. reports 88.8 guns per 100 people. So the answer is yes. The ridiculousness that makes these shootings even more likely to happen does exist and on a significant scale.
Besides being asked such questions while I'm abroad, what does the gun topic matter to me? I come from a tiny town of fewer than 200 people. My dad grew up there, as did his dad before him and his dad before him. In fact, ask any Chinese person and it's likely that they have just such a family village. It's very rare in such small towns for violence in the form of terrorism to occur. Yet it's been happening right across the street from my family. They, themselves, have received threats. All from a low-class, uneducated, possibly drug-induced man who also happens to own a few guns, one of which he brazenly carries in a holster attached to his hip. There is no 'why' or reason to his active disturbance of the peace. According to this person's brand of "freedom," he's allowed to do whatever he wants. Now that includes toting a gun across the street--police presence aside--to "talk."
Last year I lived across the hall from two Sierra Leone guys who had both grown up during their country's recent war. One of them had hidden with his family in the bush for the better part of a year. As I mentioned in a former post, one of Tunisia's politicians was assassinated and DA3 was horrified, partly because that was only the second time that has ever happened in his country. My South Korean friends are more concerned about a possible attack from their northern counterparts than a gunman in their classroom (the feeling is probably mutual in North Korea) and, honestly, it's a very slight worry at that. The last time my Vietnamese friend went home, his mother was robbed while on her motorcycle (a risk in itself in Hanoi). From petty theft to nuclear warheads, there are things that will break up the monotony of our daily lives whether we ask for them or not. So my question is: why does stupidity need to be one of them?
The way I see it, my Sierra Leone friends are halfway across the world from their homes and working to get an education in order to go back and help turn the country around. I cannot imagine either one of them wielding a gun against his neighbor. DA3 could not fathom why a person would feel the need to kill a stranger, but to pull a gun on your neighbor would seem to him even more absurd and cruel. I'm sure that half the reason keeping North and South Korea from going back to war is simply blood relations. Unless the government explicitly demands it, I don't believe that either party would go against their own ethnicity like that. So how is it that America is getting so off-track? As education takes more and more of a back seat, people are forgetting how to build life instead of destroy it. For whatever reason, people are not learning that to cherish and practice one's own freedom means the active protection of another's freedom, too. Such self-centered recklessness is literally happening in my front yard.
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