Enough is Enough

This isn’t about taking away rights. It’s about protecting children.

For weeks, I agonized over the speech I was to deliver to my fellow hospital directors.

But once I stepped up to the podium and got through the intro, things went fine. My mike was working, my slides were progressing, and a few heads in the audience were nodding.

Suddenly, everything changed.

The back doors burst open. In flew four large men, two running up each aisle, screaming and waving rifles.

From my perch on stage, I watched as my colleagues slipped from their seats into protective crouches — moving like a wave from the back of the auditorium to the front.

In an instant, one of the gunmen was onstage and in my face. He yelled at me to lie facedown. The heel of his boot pressed into the small of my back.

As I lay on the floor trembling, the gunman (apparently in an extra act of intimidation) used the nuzzle of his gun to gently comb my hair.

It all happened so quickly that I failed to recall what should have been obvious to me: This was September, National Preparedness Month when hospitals around the country hold active shooter drills.

So this was a drill. A practice run. Plopped right in the middle of my presentation.

I breathed a sigh of relief knowing the brute hovering over me was only an actor.

But physically, my body continued to respond as if I were about to die. My heart was beating out of my chest, and I was having a hard time breathing. For weeks afterward, I had nightmares.

Disturbing as it was, my experience couldn’t begin to compare to the anguish of the parents in Uvalde, Texas, whose children never came home because a teenager with an assault rifle decided to shoot up their school.

This is the latest in a long and sorry history of gun violence in America. So far in 2022 in the U.S., there have been 27 mass school shootings. And that’s just a sliver of all America’s mass shootings this year, which total 212.

In America, mass shootings happen not only to elementary school children, but to grocery store shoppers, concertgoers, restaurant patrons, and folks attending church and synagogues.

They have occurred in subways, courthouses, airports, nursing homes, workplaces, banks, universities, hospitals, nightclubs, yoga studios, beauty salons, libraries, veterans' homes, apartment complexes, movie theaters, and gas stations.

There’s literally no safe place to go.

Since 2014, there have been 185,051 gun-related deaths in the U.S., per the Gun Violence Archive. That’s equivalent to wiping out the entire population of Tempe, Arizona.

In response, we offer “thoughts and prayers.” But as my mother likes to say, “God helps those who help themselves.” What about practical solutions?

Some are suggesting common-sense measures such as banning assault weapons or mandating universal background checks.

Sadly, we’ve been here before. In 1993 — as a result of the outcry following the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan — the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act passed, which required background checks. The next year, the Federal Assault Weapons Ban became law.

But these measures didn’t last. In 1997, following many NRA legal challenges, the Supreme Court ruled that background checks couldn’t be federally mandated. In 2004, the Federal Assault Weapons Ban expired.

So it’s deja vu all over again. Without, of course, the equivalent of the population of Tempe, Arizona.

“Each time this comes up, we are fed the excuse that common-sense reforms like background checks might not have stopped the last massacre, or the one before that, or the one before that, so why bother trying. I reject that thinking. We know we can’t stop every act of violence, every act of evil in the world. But maybe we could try to stop one act of evil, one act of violence.”

— President Barack Obama

So where does that leave us?

Second amendment rights are important. But we should also remember that every time a person is murdered, they’re stripped of their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Seventeen children and two teachers in Uvalde will never come home from school. One husband suffered a fatal heart attack because his wife was among the slaughtered, leaving their four children orphans.

In the coming months, scores more won’t return from work, church, or what should have been a routine trip to the supermarket, the salon, or the mall.

It might be you. It might be me. It might be our family members or friends.

We are better than this. We must do something. Our society is screaming in rage and in pain. We must find ways to reduce gun violence while preserving our Second Amendment.

Too many lives are cut short by guns. It’s crushing our society as well as our souls.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this story, come join my free mailing list or support me and other writers by becoming a Medium member. You can also visit my profile to find a whole lot more.