Wednesday, September 4, 2024

“We have created this hellscape for our children”

Dr. Annie Andrews, pediatrician and senior advisor to Everytown for Gun Safety, on MSNBC a few minutes ago:

“My heart is broken for this community, for every child that was in that building today, for the children whose lives were stolen by this public health crisis of gun violence. And I have a pit in my stomach, as I do every time I see these headlines.

“This is a public health crisis, and what is so infuriating about it is we have created this hellscape for our children. Every child in this country goes to school and sits in a classroom where they should be learning how to read and write, and they're also learning how to hide from a bad man with the gun. And for far too many children in this country, that reality grows even darker when an active shooter incident happens.

“This is a public health crisis, and we know the solutions. The solutions include commonsense gun laws, like expanded background checks, secure-storage laws so that adult gun owners cannot allow access to children to their firearms, and red-flag laws. What we lack in this country is elected leaders with the moral courage to pass the laws that the majority of Americans know that we need and that the children in this country so desperately need and deserve.

“We have robbed every child in this country of a sense of physical and psychological safety in their classrooms, and as a mother, it breaks my heart.”
Related reading
Everytown for Gun Safety

[Context: yet another school shooting, this one at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia. My transcription and paragraphing.]

comments: 2

Sean Crawford said...

My daydream is of a National Rifle Association guy meeting in the White House on camera, and the president challenging him to have a series of bigger and bigger meetings of NRA people until at last, a year later, the NRA can proactively come up with ideas on camera, one year later in the White House.
Of course, to mitigate human stupidity, the president would have to explicitly say that the ideas/plans do not have to include taking our guns away. And also remind NRA guys during the year not to believe social media that says otherwise. "Only believe real media about what the NRA is discussing."

As for treating it as a health issue, back during AIDS, according to an AIDS Calgary guy, my city did better than other cities because we treated it as a health issue, not a political cultural human rights issue.
Sean Crawford

Michael Leddy said...

I’m afraid the NRA and its supporters will go on offering nothing more than the usual thoughts and prayers. Here’s something ironic: our representative in the state legislature, a hardliner on “gun rights,” runs a father-son camp to which you can’t bring weapons. I wonder why.