Dear Spokesman,

I’m angry. Angry that any person could believe that civilians should be allowed to have assault weaponry. Angry at right-wing politics for propagating this problem, and at left-wing politics for not doing more about it. But most of all, I’m angry at myself. I’m angry at myself for not knowing that there was another mass shooting on March 22, less than a week after the hate crimes in Atlanta. I’m angry at myself for not knowing that a student was murdered at school in Knoxville today, less than 8 hours earlier than my writing of this.

But then, how could I have known?

Because in any other developed country, a school shooting is a once-in-a-lifetime event. But in America, it’s so “normal” that it doesn’t even make the front page of CNN.

What irritates me endlessly is American culture’s obsession to blame shootings on everything but guns. 

“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

“Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”

“Mental health support is the problem, not guns.”

“It’s in the Constitution!”

But systems like this, which allow anybody to purchase a gun aren’t going to attract good people. Good people don’t get satisfaction from knowing they’re capable of killing someone in an instant. For a large majority of people, a gun is a terrifying responsibility, not a privilege. And so our country is left with an arrangement where, specifically because everyone can have a gun, only the people who deserve them the least own them.

When a system is broken, it needs to be fixed. And yet, if that had happened, I wouldn’t have had to write this article. I wouldn’t have had to attend assemblies telling me how to react to a school shooter. Most importantly, families and communities like my own wouldn’t have had to mourn the lives of innocent people, people who didn’t want to die, who didn’t need to.

In short, 

Dear Spokesman, 

I’m angry at the political system built on antiquated laws and a blatant disinterest for ethics that  allowed this to happen, and I’m angry at myself for not doing more about it. Maybe we all should be.

Regards,

Navaneeth Rajan