Enough Is Enough!

A call to arms to end gun violence.

I am not an immigrant. My ancestors were. My husband and his parents are. The founding fathers of the United States, whose ideology of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” that is the fabric of this country and inspires so many of us to relocate here, were also immigrants.

One of the most fundamental drivers for any of us to uproot from our home and move to another country, and oftentimes to another continent, always is hope — hope for a better future.

“The immigrant’s journey is fundamentally about leaving behind the old world to build one anew, too often at tremendous cost. No one understood this better than Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and their compatriots. These men may have died on American soil, but they were all born in the British colonies. In this way, these immigrant visionaries helped the United States become the world’s leading political, economic, and cultural power.” ~ New American Economy

The founding fathers and their comrades left their homeland for the hope of a better future and they documented those hopes and intentions through the decrees written in the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights, known collectively as the Charters of Freedom.

They wrote the Charters of Freedom as a blueprint they believed would ensure a better life; a life of great hope and promise. The potential they themselves left their origin country in pursuit of, and fought for, in the Revolutionary War.

The authors of these formative documents were human and thereby flawed. The ideological documents being written by flawed humans by default are also flawed. Many groups of people were not protected nor represented, such as black people, indigenous people and women.

Regardless of where we each stand on the authors and the premises these founding documents are based, my hope is that we all can stand in support of finding a meaningful way forward that protects our children and teachers from being murdered and those who survive from being forever traumatized at the hands of an assassin with a gun at our schools.

Since its ratification in 1791, the right to “keep and bear Arms” as written in the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights has been debated with vehement arguments.

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” ~ Amendment II, Bill of Rights

The crux of the debate is whether the amendment protects the right of private individuals to keep and bear arms, or whether it instead protects a collective right that should be exercised only through formal militia units.

One thing is certain though. The intent as written into law was for protection.

NOT TO GUN DOWN INNOCENT CHILDREN AND TEACHERS AT SCHOOL. Period. Full stop.

These events have a catastrophic ripple effect especially for those present, their families, and their communities as this Stanford study finds on gun violence in schools. Ripple affects impact not only their lives but the lives of their children and all those who they are close to. Generations of fear, anxiety, mistrust, mental health issues, and despair are being created by these atrocities.

There were 51 school shootings in 2022 that resulted in injuries or deaths. 2021 had 35 school shootings with injuries or death, 10 in 2020, and 24 each in 2019 and 2018 according to Education Week. If we look at ALL shootings at schools in 2022 that number is 303, 250 in 2021, 114 in 2020 and 119 each in 2019 and 2018 according to K-12 School Shooting Database. Unlike other databases, the K-12 School Shooting Database records this information to document the full scope of gun violence on our school campuses. And there are countless numbers of victims including those murdered, those present who were injured physically and mentally but escaped with their lives, family members, first responders, medical professionals, and community members.

There are not adequate words to express the abhorrent senselessness of this violence. Have not enough children and educators been killed in their classrooms between reading and arithmetic at the hands of gun violence? When is enough really enough to figure this out? We can mastermind how to deliver people to the moon and to mars but we are not willing to truly roll up our sleeves and figure out how to protect our children and teachers from the atrocity of literally being massacred at school. I would say I am at a loss of words, but clearly I am not.

I implore us all to stand up and fight in whatever way makes sense for each of us to protect our precious children and the noble adults who signed up to educate them. We can no longer ask our children to endure this grotesqueness nor for our teachers and staff to be human shields against assault-style automatic ammunition spewing at them from military type rifles.

Sandy Hook Promise and Women Against Gun Violence are two organizations that I have supported both with my pocketbook and with my time. Today I donate again, continue to advocate, and pray for a future where our children and our teachers will no longer be regular targets of gun violence at the hands of those who wield these weapons for reasons not intended under the Second Amendment.

My husband and I are activists. My young children are also activists and participants in their democracy. In pursuit of enacting change, they have marched, protested, donated, written letters to our political representatives, and produced songs, including the one included below. We all can make a difference. But we must act.

“Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.” ~ Robert F. Kennedy

Please join us in bringing awareness, unity, and change to this dire situation in your own unique way. One small act you can take is to share this essay and this song creating a ripple effect of hope and agency in ending senseless gun violence in schools.

With love,

Whitney