My Son Starts Kindergarten in the Fall and I am Afraid of Something for the First Time

If you only get your information from cable news stations such as Fox or MSNBC, you’d probably be scared of many things. Among the things that pundits tell us our scary include illegal immigrants, white nationalists, ISIS, climate change, police officers, ANTIFA, Candace Owen, Socialism, and Iran. None of those things scare me. At all. Not one bit. I live twenty minutes from the Mexican border and twenty minutes from the Ocean in another direction so the illegal immigration issue is in my backyard and San Diegans are particular “vulnerable” to . . . .I don’t know, attacks from the sea? The “news” has become a clown show.

For the first time in my entire life though, I am afraid of something. I am afraid because my son is going to Kindergarten in the fall and I am scared that someone is going to walk into his school with a gun and shoot up the place. I wish how I felt were not true, but it is. I cannot help it. School and church shootings truly are a part of American society. What does that mean? It’s “normal.” It happens a lot and it will happen a lot more in the future. It happens so much that my friend’s son was describing what it was like to go through an active shooter drill as if it were the earthquake or tornado drills that my generation went through as gradeschoolers. I read the other day that almost 250,000 children were present at school when a school shooting occurred since Columbine happened in 1999. I also read in the Washington Post that more children were killed in school shootings through May of 2018 then servicemen were killed overseas. Think about that. That’s insane. It’s generational. And it will have long term consequences for these children. In fact, a girl who survived the Stonemen Douglas shooting recently committed suicide over survivor’s guilt. I am sure there have been and will be others.

So my little big guy is going to school and I won’t be there to take that bullet for him and that’s terrifying to me. I spent the first five years of his life protecting him from the evils out there and preparing him for the big world he is about to enter but I cannot do anything to prepare him for a school shooting. And I haven’t. Why would I?

School and church shootings were always sad and scary but seem remote when you don’t have kids in school or when the tragedy happens a long ways from home. Like wars overseas or damage from hurricanes, news that is “out of sight and out of mind” still doesn’t sting the way my friend’s little boy described his school’s active shooting drills. After we heard his story, my wife asked me if I had asked the person giving us our kindergarten tour if my son’s school practices active shooter drills. I had not. So here I am, having thought I had prepared my son for everything when in fact, I had completely forgot about the biggest danger.

My son can score a goal with both feet. He can hit the cover off the ball. He knows how to love. He knows when to say please and thank you. He knows that Captain America is the best Avenger and that “no matter how many times we get knocked down, we always get back up” because that’s what Spiderman does. He knows that he’s a big brother and he has to take care of his siblings and he knows that hard work is always rewarded. He’s a great kid. My world. My mini me. My wife and I taught him all of these things. But we never bothered to think to even ask our guide about active shooter drills.

And then the school shooting at STEM in Colorado happened the same week that our friend’s son described his active shooter drill and I realized that I am afraid. I am sure I am not alone. I am sure there are other parents out there that feel the same way. But why do we have to feel this way? Why have school and church shootings become a part of our American lives?

I genuinely believe that it starts with parenting. The adults. There’s some cable news problems and our politicians, especially those that have been in office for 20+ years are utterly useless. But adults. People with kids in school or kids that are about to begin school hold the key to stopping this epidemic. We can fix this. Here’s how.

1. Stop being angry at the world all of the time and be positive. The country isn’t as big of a shit show as the news makes it seem. Despite everything terrible on the news, life is pretty damn good right now and how we feel and project those feelings plays a large roll in who we are and what type of example we set for our kids. If we’re angry all the time, our kids likely will be too.
2. Pay more attention to your kids. Being a parent is the greatest experience of a life full of great experiences. I do not understand why we as parents wouldn’t give absolutely everything we can to make sure we give them everything possible until we simply cannot give any more. You owe it to your children to be present and engaged. We need to know when things are bothering our children so that we can properly address the issues to hopefully spot the warning signs.
3. Hold your children accountable if they are bullies. Bullying in schools is not a new phenomenon but the bullied oftentimes become the shooters.
4. Do not buy your kids toy guns. Why would you?
5. If you do buy your kids toy guns or if you have real guns in the house, you MUST teach them to respect the gun. The basic rules of firearm safety that my father taught me are still relevant today. When I was a child, the NRA put on the gun safety courses. I am not sure if the NRA still does this, but they’re hardly a reliable source for anything sensible in 2019.
6. Lock your guns in a safe so that your children do not have access to them. Duh.
7. As a country, we need to take mental health serious. My mother-in-law doesn’t even believe that mental illnesses are a real thing and I know she’s not alone.
8. Schools need to get more funding. Period. Full Stop. Let me explain. The educational piece of public schools is severely underfunded. It’s a tragic shame that teachers across the country have to buy supplies or schools such as those in Baltimore don’t have heat in the dead of winter. But now we need to spend money on safety too. Our governments must commit to funding to both the educational side but also safety. If Florida wants to arm teachers, then we need to find funding. If other states want to try something else, we need money to try other options. For example, we need to put more counselors in schools so that the bullies and the bullied have someone to talk to about how they feel. We have to move away from a “get tough” sort of mentality and provide our children with the resources necessary to navigate thirteen years of school.
9. This might be the most important item but we absolutely must vote out career politicians who will 1. resist any and all proposals and 2. argue that the only solution is to ban all guns. These politicians are useless and part of the problem. There’s plenty of sensible solutions that go nowhere because the “debate” is toxic. We have to hold our elected officials accountable.

It was quite the feeling when it occurred to me recently that I was genuinely afraid for Mikey’s safety because he was about to start kindergarten. It made me angry. I felt powerless. Vulnerable. I never feel this way. Most children will never experience gun violence unless it happens at school or church. There’s something morbidly wrong about this.

We can make change. I believe it can happen but we have to do it together.  Let’s do this.