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As educators, we are expected to provide leadership for students.  By virtue of licensure and community expectations, we are held to a higher standard of moral, ethical, and behavioral leadership.  But on the issue of student safety and gun violence, the leadership is coming from the students.  While we as educators have been worrying about active shooter drills and locking the doors, the Parkland shooting survivors are sponsoring a comprehensive position on gun control.  (This is a link to a Washington Post story about the proposal with an excellent video with commentary by the students. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/parkland-students-unveil-sweeping-gun-control-proposal-and-hope-for-a-youth-voting-surge-in-2020/2019/08/20/145f4574-c36f-11e9-9986-1fb3e4397be4_story.html?noredirect=on)  

All educators interested in protecting students should contact legislative policy makers, who likely are only contemplating weak and ineffective measures, such as flagging the mentally ill to prevent their gun purchases.  Educators and others should be resolute in only supporting candidates, regardless of party, who support at least some elements the Parkland proposal. 

Here are some quick facts about guns in the United States to encourage you to think about the proposal.

• We have around 4% of the world’s population, but we have almost half of the world’s civilian owned guns.  We have many more guns than we have people. (120 guns for every 100 people.)
• American children between the ages of 15 and 19 are 82 times more likely to die from gun homicide than children from countries of similar wealth and government.
• America has six times more gun homicides than Canada and 21 times more than rough and tumble Australia.

To further stimulate your thinking, these are the facts about military style assault weapons in the United States.

• Definitions of assault rifles vary by jurisdiction, but various conservative estimates indicate the that U.S. has between two and eight million weapons capable of rapid fire with large ammunition magazines.  The firearms trades industry calls these weapons “Modern Sporting Rifles” and suggest there may be 15 million in circulation in the U.S.
• An analysis by the pro-gun control group, Everytown for Gun Safety, last year found that “Mass shootings that involved the use of high-capacity magazines resulted in more than twice as many fatalities and 14 times as many injuries on average compared to those that did not.”
• Given the potential for carnage with these weapons, several law enforcement groups have advocated for banning them in civilian use, as happened in the U.S. for ten years beginning in 1994.
• Other countries such as Australia and New Zealand have changed course to ban these weapons and institute buy-back programs.  Most other countries never allowed them.