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Remember When Middle School Was About Geometry and History?

January 24th, 2008, blog post by kmcomer

Recently we remembered one of our nation’s most transformative leaders and victims of gun violence. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. inspired our nation. He inspired not through platitudes or hollow promises. On the contrary, Dr. King fully and openly laid bare dark and painful realities of our society at the time. But in the face of great challenge, Dr. King spoke of a refusal to “believe that the bank of justice is Bankrupt . . . [a refusal] to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity in this nation.”

I was in health classes at Washington Middle School getting an up-close glimpse of the reality our young people are growing up in. There is no doubt they are smart, thoughtful and savvy. At one point, one of them mentioned “If you don’t let the good guys have the guns, then who will get the bad guys. Don’t we need to protect ourselves?” Another student responded in shock: “Why don’t we just give everyone a gun, then we’ll definitely solve the problem and we’ll have no gun violence!”

The sad reality, however, is that when discussing what to do if they find themselves in a situation involving a firearm, their reactions were scarily aware. One young girl mentioned that she would need to run in a serpentine fashion away from anyone shooting at her – this was after a detailed description of exactly what she would do prior to the point of escape. The heaviness of the burden our young people bear because we have not controlled the level of firearm violence in our communities is great. We saw that burden in all too stark terms when a young man younger than fourteen lost his life in Seattle in a senseless shooting, his friend barely escaping the same fate. In such a prosperous nation, it is unconscionable that our young people should be relegated to growing up in fear of great physical violence – in the most recent Behavioral Survey conducted by the Center for Disease Control – approximately 1 out of every 17 young people survey stated that they had not attended school in the last thirty days because they were afraid to go to school.

We can stand up against the injustice of violence in our communities; refusing to succumb to the false belief there is nothing we can do. Reducing gun violence is not rocket science, it’s simple prevention. I hope that one day through prevention we will lessen the burden violence places on communities, so that young people can continue thinking about more important things; like History, Geometry, Biology, Wuthering Heights and Their Eyes Were Watching God.