Beth Revis

Because school gun violence is an epidemic in America

When my little boy started going to school, he was thrilled to tell me all about his first fire drill and how the firefighters gave the kids plastic helmets and let them see the truck.

Then he told me about the “shattered glass” drill.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“It’s if a stranger breaks the windows! We hide so he doesn’t see us, and Teacher locks the doors.”

My heart dropped. I knew what wasn’t being said. What the stranger would break the windows with.

How feeble a lock on the door would be.

Prior to becoming a full-time writer, I worked as a high school teacher. Every year we had drills.

My sixteen-year-old students had been through a violent attack in middle school, when a classmate brought a weapon with the intent to do harm. You didn’t hear about it. It didn’t make it past the local news—school shootings are too common now, and since the student was stopped before anyone was hurt, it wasn’t really “news.”

Except to the kids who lived it. They knew exactly what those drills were for, and why they were important.

They knew in a way my son did not. 

Yet.

School gun violence is an epidemic in America. Bulletproof backpacks are available for about a hundred bucks with cute puppies printed on the outside. No other nation in the world has shooting drills.

And no other nation has children who fundamentally understand that gun lobbyists consider them an acceptable loss compared to their profits.

I don’t want to ban every gun in the nation. I was raised in the South, with hunters and sportsmen in my family.

But I also don’t want my son to ever know exactly what “shattered glass” drills are for. 

And that’s why Kamala Harris has my vote. Sensible gun control to limit mass-murder weapons.

Beth Revis is a New York Times best-selling author and can be found at bethrevis.com.