I was 10 years old when the Oklahoma City bombing happened. It was my first direct encounter with evil when I was old enough to understand it, my first realization that I lived in a world where babies could get blown to bits just because one human being had hate in his heart.
I came across a People magazine cover with the victims’ pictures arranged in a grid. I scoured the story. I stared at the faces. I could not understand what had happened. So I wrote a poem. Furiously, in pencil, on notebook paper, at my desk in my room. An open letter to the bomber himself, a plea for understanding, a 10-year-old’s sentimental memorial. I ran downstairs and handed it to my mother and immediately hid in our living room in a corner between the bookshelf and the wall, embarrassed to confront the emotion behind my words, to see her reaction.
At 27 years old, responding to the Newtown massacre, I feel just as I did when I was 10: betrayed, shocked, shaken to the innermost core of myself, disbelieving that I live in a country where this kind of evil is possible, somewhat ashamed of the disproportionate emotion I feel as someone who is “removed” from the situation.
People are also reading…
And yet.
Twenty children under the age of 8. Gone. Six teachers who sacrificed their own lives to save those of their students.
Gone.
I cannot be silent.
The National Rifle Association emerged from its own silence to make this tone-deaf declaration in a press conference one week after the shootings: “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” The tiny bodies of 20 children were each punctured multiple times by bullets shot from a semiautomatic assault rifle equipped with several high-capacity magazines.
We do not need more good guys with guns.
In the days following the Sandy Hook shooting, lawmakers have expressed a new willingness to discuss gun safety. President Obama has appointed a task force on gun violence. Online petitions have circulated, calling for action at the highest levels of government to make our schools and our country safer. Dialogues have formed about the mental health needs of children and adolescents, about investments in school safety programs, and they have gained momentum. Random acts of kindness in honor of the victims have been encouraged through social media platforms.
The heart of our nation aches with the deaths of these children. Newtown is our town.
So how do we make sure that this story does not fall off the headlines, that its victims do not become a sad afterthought we refer to with a tsk of the tongue and a shake of the head?
We need federal gun control legislation, certainly; we’ve needed it for a long time. We need to ban assault weapon and high-capacity ammunition sales, to strengthen waiting periods and background checks for all gun purchases, and to enact gun safety policies.
We need to improve access to mental health services, particularly for adolescents, and we need to destigmatize the way we talk about mental health in this country. We need to reduce children’s exposure to violence in their homes and communities and to stop sensationalizing violence in the media. We need ample resources to invest in school safety programs.
We need our nation’s leaders to rise above partisan ideologies and special interests to come together and fix our broken country.
We need a reckoning.
But most of all, we need to not forget the 20 children and seven adults who were brutally slaughtered for no reason.
We need to tuck them into the folds of ourselves and learn their names and build from their legacies.
I write these words not because I have the answers. I write because I am alive and they are not. I write because I hope for change and action. I write because although I am not a teacher or a parent, I weep with them. I write because words are the only tool I have to make sense of a senseless act. I write because I hope our children will wake up tomorrow safer than they did today. I write because I fear that the headline and content of this column already feels tired and outdated, and it is not, will never be, yesterday’s news. I write because as you read these words, 6-year-old-sized coffins are sinking into the soil of suburban Connecticut. I write because I do not accept that. I write because time is running out.
Jamie Poslosky grew up in Chesterfield and moved to Washington, D.C., in 2007, where she currently works in child health policy. Her mother, sister and aunt teach in public elementary and middle schools in St. Louis.