This article is dedicated to the victims of violence across the world, especially youth. May their memories be treasured and their souls rest in peace.
Content warning: The following article discusses gun violence, suicide, and death.
On Tuesday, November 30th, a 15-year-old armed with a 9mm SIG Sauer began a five-minute violent rampage through Oxford High School in Oxford Township, Michigan, an exurb of Detroit. The shooter injured 7 and killed 4 students. Madisyn Baldwin, 17, Tate Myre, 16, Hana St. Juliana, 14, and Justin Shilling, 17, were the four deceased. Tate Myre sacrificed himself, attempting to disarm the shooter. All of them deserved to complete high school, go to college, life a full life without fear of being shot on campus.
This shooting is not a singular case. In the past few decades, the number of school shootings has rapidly increased. The United States has been living like in a bad dream for the past several years when it comes to gun violence. On December 17, a trend circulating on social media warned of threats to schools. The panic was so large that major school districts shut down, police presence in open schools increased, and concerned parents kept their children home. It is a strange and pathetic reality we live in, I thought as I watched families keep kids away from the last day before our winter break. In fact, following the Oxford High School shooting, 60 Michigan-area schools closed in addition to schools in Ohio and Pennsylvania. More the 150 threats were made across the nation just one week after the Oxford shooting.
America is so horribly unique when it comes to the growing public health problem of gun violence. According to a 2018 CNN article, America had 57 times the amount of school shootings as all the other members of the G7, the most developed nations in the world, combined. In fact, that article names Canada and France as tied for the second-most school shootings in a data sample from 2009 to May 21, 2018 with two shootings on a campus each. At the time of that article, the United States of America had suffered through 288 incidents of violence on our campuses.
There is not a word in my vocab that can truly encompass the kind of grief and anguish we experience while watching our fellow students get shot in schools, while watching as our generation gets weighed down by the distant but ever real danger of death. There is no equivalent feeling to watching your generation wither under mental illness, gun violence, and the questions regarding what a future for us will look like.
Our generation is suffering as we understand the roadblocks and obstacles of being youth, particularly minors: Being unable to vote, politicians and those in power have less interest in protecting and propounding our needs and wants. We do not have the money that large-scale campaign donors have. Unfortunately, disgustingly even, the concerns of special interest groups with money and power win out over the constituents and individual Americans.
The National Rifle Association, the largest gun rights lobbying group, has successfully prevented gun control legislation across the country, allowing gun violence to spread and worsen.
Despite the fact that a very large majority of Americans support gun control legislation, lobbing interests defeat any hope of passing laws that protect lives. In all of these conversations, youth are pushed to the sidelines. After the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in 2018, a shooting which remains the deadliest high school shooting in U.S. history with 17 dead, survivors formed groups to lobby for gun control. Republican conservatives quickly took to the news, bashing survivors and insulting them ruthlessly and disgracefully.
All the conversations that happen skirt around the basic problem. American politicians in general refuse to take into account the lives and interests of their young, non-voting constituents. The United States remains the only United Nations member who has not ratified the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child, which would provide rights to youth that are unseen or uncodified in U.S. society. Among these rights is the right to be heard in administrative proceedings affecting us. Youth are frequently disregarded while we see, as is perhaps no surprise given deadly and traumatic gun violence, increased suicide and depression rates, and horribly high child hunger and poverty rates, affecting youth across the country.
It is imperative, vital, and necessary that the double standard on life in America is rectified. Youth deserve to live, to thrive, to be successful. Youth need to be heard because we live in fear currently. We live in fear and it is the poor decisions of American politicians that have led to our fear. We do not have to live in fear. It is time we change the system so no one lives in fear. Youth will change this world. Then, no one will have to live in fear.