An Open Letter To American Gun Lobbyists

It happened again. This time, the tragic shooting spree targeted an elementary school in Madison, Wisconsin.

Once again, children and their teachers have become the targets of violence at the hands of an agonized youth with easy access to a gun she should never have had.

Once again, children will be shaking and wailing with grief and fear, stricken with trauma that they will carry for the rest of their lives. Their world, which once felt safe, now utterly shattered by the sound of gunshots.

These little ones were attending school in the middle of the United States of America, the wealthiest nation on Earth.

And yet, they now carry the kind of mental shock and anguish that we only expect to be carried by veterans.

To the gun lobbyists who continue to fight for easy access to weapons of mass death, just so they can line their own pockets, I have one question:

How do you live with yourselves?

Don't you have families? Don't you have people you love?

Has there never been a time in your life when you've looked into the eyes of a child – any child– and thought to yourself how precious and fragile they are? How they should be protected by the adults around them?

Don't you have decency? Humanity? A soul?

Because if you have any of those things, surely you must drink yourself to sleep. I can't imagine coping with the job you have without some sort of crutch.

As an empathetic person, I can't imagine signing the death warrants of children and teachers just for money. I can't imagine giving weapons of war to an untrained civillian population and ignoring the potential consequences.

And you're not the only ones I have questions about; the people who sign off on sending weapons off to the government of Israel as they commit a heinous act of genocide confound me just as much.

The people who make millions by running the healthcare racket in America, too– taking money from their clients every month, every doctor visit, demanding they pay out every opportunity that they can find to steal a dime, only to refuse coverage for the care they need to live.

What other kind of company can take so much of your money as to leave you bankrupt, only to refuse to give you the product that your cash was supposed to buy?

Monstrous.

But gun lobbyists confuse me even more.

I expect governments to do awful things in the name of diplomatic alliances. I want it to change, but it's expected. We should fight it, but it's nothing new.

I expect healthcare insurance companies to be shitty in America; it's a for-profit system, but at least they sometimes cover needed care and allow people to see the doctor. It's a screwed up system that needs to be rebuilt from the ground up, but some people do benefit.

Who benefits from guns? Other than the people peddling them?

A gun exists with only one purpose; to kill. It is a weapon that only exists to end a life.

Over and over again, we see death in the streets. We see people shooting themselves, either accidentally or on purpose. We see children getting a hold of unsecured guns and dying because they don't know what they are.

We've seen small children take daddy's gun to school and shoot their teacher because they're too young to understand the consequences and nobody stepped in to prevent it.

We've seen mass shootings, in school, at concerts, in night clubs or department stores.

We've seen cops shoot people on the suspicion that they might have a weapon, because they've been conditioned to see everybody as a potential threat to their lives.

In this climate of fear, paranoia and armed violence, do you sleep soundly at night after cashing those NRA checks?

Do the faces of the people who've died from gun violence ever cross your mind? Do the children haunt you, like they haunt their parents who sent them off to school in the hopes that they would grow, and learn, and come home at the end of the day?

I ask again, gun lobbyists: How do you live with yourselves?

If it were me, I don't think that I could.

Solidarity wins.