Science. The human brain is not fully developed until the age of twenty-five. Fully developed adults process the world relying heavily on the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for good judgement and understanding long-term decisions. Kids under the age of twenty-five rely heavily on the amygdala, the part of the brain responsible for processing emotion. The amygdala develops first. This is why my seven and eleven-year-old sons have more emotional outbursts than I do. They just feel hurt and angry in a maelstrom of childhood emotion. Logic has not kicked in yet. It won’t fully until they are twenty-five.
Still, a nineteen-year-old boy, who I wish the media would stop calling a man, legally bought an AR-15 semi-automatic assault rifle.
My amygdala says, that thing would be awesome to square up some grudges I feel against the legislators who have wronged me and this country by weaponizing our citizenry, and profiting off of the carnage. My prefrontal cortex, however, says you can’t shoot people because you are angry. But, that part of the brain is not fully developed in many of the people buying these weapons.
No semi-automatic guns until you have a fully developed brain. Couldn’t we at least start there?
Marketing. The AR-15 is, according to the NRA’s website, “America’s Most Popular Rifle.” The NRA has an entire page dedicated to singing its praises in which they explain the perks of a gun that is “customizable, adaptable, reliable, and accurate." It goes on to explain that “The AR-15s ability to be modified to your own personal taste is one of the things that makes it so unique,” like it’s a fucking American Girl Doll. They brag it “can be skinned and wrapped in all different types of colors and patterns,” like it's an iPhone case.
It is a gun. The NRA wants it to look like a toy.
Kids like toys. “Make it even cooler,” reads one Instagram post the NRA’s article highlights “add a suppressor from SilencerCo.” Who are they marketing these semi-automatic, military-grade weapons to?
Oh, right. Nineteen-year-old boys with a troubled past. And the country they want to fear those boys enough to buy their own.
Profit margins are a bitch.
English. The NRA loves to argue semantics. They love to explain that these weapons are not automatic weapons, as a way of arguing they are safe and reasonable. “There is a vast difference,” they write, “between fully automatic and semi-automatic firearms.” This means you must pull the trigger each time you want to fire a bullet; you can’t just squeeze and hold.
Vast is an adjective. It means “of very great size or proportions; huge; enormous.” As an English teacher, I must question their use of that word. Right now, hold your hand up like you are holding a gun. For one minute, pull your finger like you are pulling a trigger as quickly as possible. Count how many times you can do that in just one minute. One-hundred? Two-hundred? One or two hundred bullets per minute is not enormously different from automatic fire. A front-loading muzzleloader that must be reloaded after each shot would be vastly different. A semi-automatic with a thirty bullet magazine? That is not a vast difference.
That is total bullshit.
History. The Second Amendment was not written with AR-15s in mind. Saying that these weapons should be protected by that document is absurd. The Second Amendment was written when the only guns in existence needed to be loaded one bullet at at time.
On March 13, 1996 a man walked into a classroom in Dunblane, Scotland and killed sixteen kids and a teacher. Seventeen people, just like Florida. In response, the government introduced the Firearms Act of 1997 banning all cartridge ammunition handguns with the exception of .22 caliber single-shot weapons. Shortly thereafter those guns were banned as well. This left only muzzle-loading guns, the very guns our forefathers were actually talking about.
There have been no mass shootings since.
We are always talking about learning from history. There is the lesson. They did not offer thoughts and prayers. They offered sweeping reform to protect their children.
I was teaching the year Columbine happened. It was my first year. That event stopped this country in its tracks. The shooting in Florida, because of the failure of our legislators, was business as usual.
Math. According to a Washington Post analysis, more than 150,000 students attending 170 different schools have experienced a shooting on campus since Columbine in 1999, my first year as a teacher.
Since 1968 when they began collecting these numbers, there have been more than 1,500,000 gun deaths in this country.
Guns + more guns = more gun deaths.
Gym. Keep running those laps kids, because the leaders of this country are relying on you to be able to outrun the bullets.
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