Why Do We Keep Laying Our Children on the Altar of Guns?

Is no one else tired of this?

That's what I asked myself Wednesday morning as I watched the news of yet another school shooting -- this one in suburban Barrow County, Georgia: four dead, nine others injured at Apalachee High School.

The images on TV were too familiar: shaking children describing the sights of their friends and teachers bleeding and dying. Parents running toward the school, frantic, desperate. Terrified text messages of students praying for help from police, from their mothers, from God while they hid from a boy with a high-powered rifle. Law enforcement circling the building. Others fleeing it.

It was the same sad, sick scene that's played out dozens of times over the 25 years since the Columbine High School massacre, which was the deadliest school shooting for 19 years until it was surpassed by the Parkland high school murders. The Washington Post, which tracks school shootings, says that more than 382,000 students have experienced gun violence at school in the last quarter-century -- that's more than the populations of New Orleans or Cleveland.

How do you know when school is back in session? one dad influencer asked in a brief post. When the school shootings start, he said.

Now, the ages of the victims do change. Sometimes they're teenagers, gangly and awkward, just beginning to find their paths in life before their time is cut short. Or maybe they're soft-cheeked elementary school students, all innocent smiles in the pictures their parents give the news stations after their deaths.

In the shooting's aftermath there were, of course, the same empty platitudes from politicians who only recently posed proudly with weapons strikingly similar to the ones used to mow down the very children those politicians were supposed to protect.

Thoughts and prayers.

No time for politics.

Extend our condolences.

Tragedy.

There are businesses ready to rush in, offering schools high-tech buttons that call 911 after the shooting starts, doors that lock children inside to keep the madmen out, metal detectors that will tell you when a student brings the gun his father gave him to school. There are instructors for lockdown drills that teach kids as young as 5 how to be silent as mice while they're hunted.

There are stories of the teachers who stepped between children and bullets, of football coaches and school psychologists and teachers in the middle of lessons about the Holocaust. The other day, I went to my children's school for curriculum night. My son's first-grade teacher talked about her top priority in class: the kids' safety.

She knows she's risking her life doing this work, it occurred to me as she teared up, mid-sentence. She must. So many others like her already have lost theirs.

There are courtroom scenes, of a wild-eyed child being marched in front of crying family members of the victims recently slain.

There's vague talk of "mental health," of threat assessments, of which adults knew or should have known that a child had problems and access to a gun.

There's talk of parenting and religion and the FBI and social services and arming teachers and installing school resource officers.

But what there never is? Any talk of change. Of doing anything differently. Of examining, as a nation, our relationship with weapons and why we happily lay so many of our children on the altar of guns.

It is, in a word, exhausting.

I, for one, am tired of the merry-go-round and would like to exit the ride, please. It keeps going, around and around, over and over, for years and years, making me sick to my stomach and ill with dread. I just don't know how to get off.

I wonder, am I alone? Is it just me?

Because if it isn't, if there are others who feel exactly as fed up as I do, why doesn't someone just turn the ride off? Why doesn't someone stop it, before it comes around again?

ArcaMax

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Georgia Garvey

Georgia Garvey