Opinion – From Where I Sit: Robb Elementary Massacre Should Be Calling Card To Act

Nineteen children. That’s how many were killed in the recent massacre at the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas on May 24. Two faculty members killed. The gunman himself a child, only 18 years of age, was shot dead by a border patrol officer in a deadly confrontation.

Over the last decades, we’ve seen a total of 231+ mass shootings and the number increases daily. We’ve seen them in churches, stores, day spas and hotels. Just last year, we had a total of 21 shootings. Now, not only are the numbers doubling, but they are occurring at a quicker pace with no signs of slowing. Worst case scenario, even children, the product of a budding generation, are being exposed to these mass shootings.

The majority of these cases are schools. This year, we’ve seen 30 shootings at K-12 schools. These types of mass murders fall into a very particular pattern: institutions of learning have the potential of institutions of deadly hostage-taking.

For almost an hour, a gunman had 19 children and two teachers trapped in two adjoining classrooms with barricades, then he fatally shot them. Why he did it and what was his history is in stark contrast to the young man of the same age behind another act of terrorism at a supermarket in Buffalo, where a total of 10
African Americans were killed — a racially-motivated massacre enkindled by the infamous white replacement theory, peddled by several politicians and cable news anchors of which he had been engrossed for a long time.

In these times, when children’s lives are supposedly a time of learning, loving and laughter, they are also times of bleak, unspeakable tragedies.

The massacre started around 11:30 a.m. right after the gunman, armed with two AR-15-style rifles which he bought after turning 18, crashed his car outside the building. A nearby witness dispatched Uvalde police and the gunman retreated into the building. Prior to the event, the young man shot his grandmother who, miraculously, survived.

The problem isn’t so much the perpetrators of these massacres but the laws that grant them the means to get the weapon. Aiming to change these laws or add new ones for more than a decade now, we have placed our trust in Congress to pass legislation that would prevent another massacre from happening.

But where there is meaningful legislation, there is also controversial politics. When debating the Second Amendment, the plausibility of gun control is unnecessarily scrutinized. Every time we try to convince someone of the significance of gun legislation, all we do is create a rift and a sense of distrust.

One side wants to reduce the presence of guns in the country. The other wants to do the opposite and put more guns in the hands of Americans. So far, notwithstanding the mass shootings throughout the years, those who seek to do the opposite of what we implore evidently refuse to compromise.

Unless we can fill this rift with sentiments of justification, all we will have to look back on in our long struggle for enacting reasonable gun legislation is a backlog from the moratorium of inaction.

What they confuse for a political gambit is but a moral recommendation. The point of gun control this whole time has been to keep firearms from falling into the wrong hands because when they do, tragedies like what we have seen in Columbine in 1999, Sandy Hook in 2012 and Robb Elementary just this year, are bound to happen.

Unchecked liberty to carry arms gives a sort of advantage to the depraved. Strong gun legislation restrains the depraved. Weak gun legislation sanctions the depraved. The stronger the legislation, the more regulated the depraved.

Take Texas, for example. As everybody knows by now, the state of Texas has become a major force in advancing right to bear arms with the passing of laws like permitless carry, open carry and a ban on background checks.

We also know by now that the gunman did not hit Robb Elementary at random. Reports say that the gunman left an augury of his dastardly deed in a few private messages on Instagram and a post on Facebook, swanking the rifles that would be used in the shooting. He even directly stated, in one of his messages, that he was “going to shoot up an elementary school rn (Sic).”

He was of a depraved heart because he had plotted the horrendous event long before.

It gets deeper still. Since lowering the age requirement for purchasing assault weapons from 21 to 18, children are both murdering and being murdered before they are even adults.

Mistakes were made in the handling of the fatal invasion. According to the given timeline in the investigation, a faculty member left a door propped open ultimately allowing the gunman access inside the school. After someone at a nearby funeral home made a 9-1-1 call about a person armed with a rifle, a responding resource officer failed to notice the gunman in hiding behind a row of vehicles and had mistaken a teacher as the suspect.

And as they stood idle in the hallway, the Uvalde police chief made the decision to delay queuing the officers to breach the classroom where the children and teachers were being held, despite calls from one of the children inside, pleading for them to act. The ill-preparedness demonstrated that day proves just how dangerous downplaying the potentials for such tragedies can be.

It is true that America would not exist had the soldiers in George Washington’s Continental Army not been armed, and for a long time, firearms have come to symbolize a sort of bold heroism. But these days, people have long learned to valorize laws that promote them better than to scrutinize the ongoing crises of disasters that end with the blood of children and the tears of parents.

They continuously suggest that gun rights are God-given rights. But if gun rights are God-given rights, what is a child’s life? Must we treat one as highly precious and the other as downright expendable? Can a just-turned-18-year-old casually walk into a store to purchase rifles and drive up to a school two days later to gun down 19 children and two teachers in a barricaded room?

I continuously hear someone telling others that legislating arms would not solve the problem of gun violence. Then they get the reply of “In theory, what might protect someone without a gun from someone with a gun?” Their response is “a person with a gun.”

Under this discretion of crediting the pros and discrediting the cons of gun accessibility, one deliberately misinterprets the reasoning of those who advocate for gun control.

If nothing is done about this, then day by day, more people will be attending the funerals of little boys and little girls. More proud parents who had just attended their child’s honor roll ceremony will end up grieving.

Worst case scenario: our obsession with the Second Amendment will be our undoing in due time, if we continue killing each other and putting children in the line of fire. The freedom to live while living in America will cease to exist.

Editor’s Note: Shannon Reid is a 2020 English graduate of Penn State Greater Allegheny and he periodically is a guest columnist for The GA-Zette.

Story by: Shannon Reid (Guest Columnist)