Local opinion: Alice Vail Middle School gun on campus

On Tuesday, Aug. 25, parents at Alice Vail Middle School were faced with the reality that a student had brought a firearm onto campus. These are not parents located in some distant city where we convince ourselves that high crime rates or gang violence are the reason for this type of thing happening. These are parents who are raising their families right here in our community. Alice Vail Middle School is located in Tucson near 22nd and Craycroft.

These parents sent their children to school on Tuesday morning thinking safety measures currently in place would keep their children out of harm's way. The reality is that despite current campus safety measures, another student was able to bring a firearm from home to school on the bus, where he showed it to another student before the potential for danger was brought to the administration’s attention.

Some argue that because nothing happened, we should be grateful and simply move on without giving the incident any more thought. After all, they say children are curious by nature, and this is just a case of a child wanting to show a friend something that he was interested in.

As a gunshot wound survivor of the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival mass shooting in which 60 people were killed and 413 injured, I absolutely disagree with anyone who wants to dismiss the seriousness of a child bringing a firearm onto campus because the incident did not result in death. The fact of the matter is that innocent students and school staff members could have easily died because a child had access to a firearm.

While the details of how the student at Alice Vail Middle School gained access to a firearm have not been disclosed, we know that school shooters often use weapons obtained from their own home. According to research conducted by the Brady Campaign (an American nonprofit organization that advocates for gun sense laws and against gun violence), up to 80% or more of youth school shooters or minors bringing guns on campus obtain the weapons from their own home, relatives or a friend, often due to unsecured storage. An even more frightening statistic published by Everytown for Gun Safety indicates that an estimated 6.7 million children in the United States live in a household with at least one loaded, unlocked gun.

It is time that we as a society demand that our lawmakers pass secure gun storage laws that will keep children from accessing unsecured weapons and bringing them onto school campuses. It does not matter that these incidents do not always result in mass casualties. The possibility that harm can be done to an innocent child because another child’s parent or relative refuses to safely store their firearm needs to be removed from our society with the passage of secure storage laws. By simply removing the option for children to access unsecured weapons, so many innocent lives can be saved. Secure gun storage laws are not only effective in keeping children from carrying firearms onto campuses, but they also reduce unintentional deaths and lower suicide rates.

A University of Washington study found that unintentional firearm deaths among young people dropped by 23% in states with secure storage laws. Studies by the Institute for Firearm Injury Prevention show that when firearms and ammunition are locked securely, children face a 78% lower risk of self-inflicted firearm injuries and an 85% lower risk of unintentional firearm injuries.

Take action and demand that our lawmakers pass secure storage laws so that no other parent has to face the reality that their child was put in harm's way because we allow people to do whatever they want with their weapons and do not hold them accountable when that choice puts innocent people at risk.

If you own a gun that is not safely secured, please remedy that situation before you are the cause of unnecessary suffering. Gun locks can be acquired for free from several resources, including the Everytown for Gun Safety Be SMART program (BeSMARTforKids.org). You can also purchase handprint accessible gun safes from Amazon for a reasonable price.