Paul Sancya / AP
A well wisher kneels to pray at a memorial on the sign of Oxford High School in Oxford, Mich., Wednesday, Dec. 1, 2021. A 15-year-old sophomore opened fire at the school, killing several students and wounding multiple other people, including a teacher.
Monday, Dec. 6, 2021 | 2 a.m.
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Which is the bigger threat to America’s children: A. the knowledge that goes into their heads at school, or B. the bullets that are being blasted into their bodies?
Any rational person would answer B, but try telling that to the Republican Party’s leadership.
The GOP has decided that censoring comprehensive discussions on our nation’s history is the way to shield our children from harm, not addressing the proliferation of guns and the accompanying rise in school shootings.
In Republicans’ demented version of logic, critical race theory is a red-alert danger, even though most of them can’t define it and it’s taught in practically no public schools. What the GOP really objects to when it whines about CRT is teaching honestly about anything but a sanitized, white-dominated history — some of them even paint slavery as a positive while others don’t want it discussed at all. The GOP’s whitewashing of history reminds us of the Chinese government, which will put people in prison for discussing Tiananmen Square.
While going all-in to censor history, the GOP fiercely resists any responsible effort to inhibit the explosion in gun ownership that has flooded the nation with some 400 million firearms in civilian hands.
Meanwhile, let’s check the body count of American children:
• History lessons: 0 victims
• Guns: An average of 864 American children ages 1 to 17 die in gun-inflicted homicides annually, according to the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. That’s more than two per day, shot dead. Another 662 die in gun-inflicted suicides, on average, and a total of nearly 8,000 are shot.
When it comes to discovering the extent to which institutionalized racism played a role in our country’s history and continues to resonate today, children might be shocked, hurt, disappointed, ashamed or deeply saddened. Or they might be inspired by our progress of brave people trying to make a better America, and hope to emulate that. They might realize we can all learn from others’ experiences and work together to redress wrongs. But no matter how they react, they remain alive to process the information, and the lessons they learn — whether painful or inspiring — equip them with the knowledge they need to be better Americans.
On the contrary, what lessons are they learning about guns in our society? For one, shootings are a constant threat, so much so that an entire generation of American children grew up participating in active-shooter drills at school. And thanks to the Republican Party, children are learning that national lawmakers won’t protect them. Congress has done virtually nothing in our children’s lifetimes to improve gun safety in America, and many states have gone the opposite direction by weakening or eliminating regulations on gun purchasing, concealed carry, etc.
In the aftermath of the most recent school shooting — four dead, seven injured at Oxford High School in Michigan — Republicans have offered their typical reaction, blaming a culture of desensitization, violent movies and video games, failure of the mental health system, and so on.
But as for an obvious threat — that there are too many guns in the hands of too many people who shouldn’t have them — the GOP treats any reasonable reform as a slippery slope to complete dismantlement of the Second Amendment. As one Republican lawmaker from Michigan said after the Oxford shooting, “If we get obsessed with eliminating all risks, we will then develop and evolve into a country that we won’t recognize. Because we’ll also have no freedoms.” Hogwash.
This is the same argument the GOP has used against reasonable regulations such as universal background checks for weapons purchases, bans on assault-style rifles and high-capacity magazines, red-flag laws, even prohibitions on sales of armor-piercing bullets, bump stocks, untraceable ghost guns, and so on.
A party that wants to censor history for all students apparently to “protect the feelings” of a few kids who can’t stand the truth while leaving the lives of all children at risk from guns is not a party that deserves to hold power at any level. It’s protecting children from a phantom threat while permitting the actual one that is sending our children to emergency rooms and morgues on a daily basis.
