resized-bus.jpgLike the commercial says, “Life comes at you fast.” Take tonight for example. My seventeen-year-old daughter comes in my bedroom and very casually says, “Hey, did you see on the national news this week that a kid at my high school was arrested Tuesday for bringing a gun to school? No, actually, I hadn’t seen that. And why was I just now hearing it from her? Well, because she’s seventeen, and she tells me things when she thinks about them. They usually come in the order of importance to her:  Boyfriend News, Dance Team News, Shopping Adventure News, Grades and Teacher News and, oh yeah, The Kid that Sits Next To Me in Economics Was Arrested for Having a Gun Shoved in His Pants News. Literally. This boy sits beside her in their economics class and on the day he was arrested for having a 9mm shoved into his waistband, there he was, sitting beside my daughter.  Gossiping, flirting. Doing the things teenage boys do at school, all the while with the cold steel of a gun pressed against his belly.


I didn’t overreact. I mean, what would be the point? By the time I’m hearing the news it’s five days after the fact. I tell her she’s like reading a two-week old newspaper. I silently thank God for protecting my daughter on a day that could have been disastrous. But then, really, couldn’t any day be disastrous? Was the danger of that hidden gun next to her any greater than the dangers she faces everyday driving around a small town with overcrowded roadways and several hundred teenaged drivers? We’ve lost more than our share of teen drivers in this little town, and we’ve yet to have a shooting at school. But the fear looms. And now, for me, it looms larger, too close to home. I’ll never forget the experience of living in Denver during the Columbine shooting. Being glued to the television hour after hour as the story unfolded and saying, “Thank God my children are little. Thank God they don’t go to THAT school.” But now my son is in college,  apparently the new target of deranged, gun-toting killers. And my daughter, attending a safe, small-town high school, looking forward to graduation in just a few months, sits next to a boy who carries a 9mm as easily as other boys carry wallets.

I wish I could stand up and say, “This is the answer!  I have a solution!” But I don’t. I don’t think anyone does. Will tougher gun laws prevent this? It’s doubtful. Tougher liquor laws didn’t prevent bootlegging in the ’20s. Tougher drug laws haven’t prevented the proliferation of meth labs. The black market has thrived on providing contraband goods ever since a snake in a garden offered forbidden fruit to a woman who should have known better.

In the end, no matter how hard we try, “doing the right thing” cannot be legislated. It comes down to each person taking responsibility for his or her own actions. Each one must be willing to consider his actions in the light of how it will affect others. The age-old idea of American freedom as our forefathers meant it — my rights end when they infringe on yours. Somehow, we’ve evolved into a If It Feels Good Do It and Damn the Rest of You nation. My rights are my rights regardless of how it affects you. So, do we burn the books and ban bright colors, as they did in the movie Pleasantville when they were faced with societal changes they didn’t want? Or do we send our kids to school in bulletproof vests and kevlar? Or perhaps we make them all wait in long lines to go through a metal detector, before they can enter the school.

What if we went back to some basic values-teaching in the schools? Not the ridiculous “if a black man, a pregnant woman, a Jew, and a computer scientist were in a life boat and there was room for only 3 who would you toss out?” teaching, but the teaching of real, life-changing values. That life is precious, and we only get one go-round. That the golden rule is still golden, and when we all play nicely in the sandbox, we can all share in the good things life offers. Together. Where there are two, if one falls down, the other helps him up. What a concept. We need each other. We NEED each other. Someone needs to help that boy who carried the gun to school get back up. Someone needs to tell him he’s a vital part of our community. Someone. Anyone?