Really I don't, because like the Brady Campaign I've given up thinking that it is even possible now.
No, I don't want your guns, your clips or your ammo. But I DO WANT CHANGE!
I don't own hand guns or rifles, though I will probably inherit. I don't have a problem with that. If I do decide to keep them they will be put in a gun safe. I hold a "Hunter's Safety Certificate" in the state of Colorado, I have had hunting licenses, and I have hunted.
On a teacher's salary hunting it was the way my father helped put food on the table. And even at 79 he goes up still with my cousin to help augment a retirement income. My parent's freezer is often full of venison.
I have slept in rooms with loaded weapons(not my room, I was visiting). I have slept through gun fire at a campground near Jefferson Lake Colorado, when a bear was entering the tent where two boys slept. They were in the camping space next to ours. Their father and mother where in a truck camper, but the boys wanted to sleep in a tent. The father had awoken to the sound of the bear going through the trash cans that used to be attached to each camping space. He watched the bear and when the bear was trying to enter the tent where his boys slept he fired several shots from his rifle into the air to scare the bear away.
It seemed everyone in the campground heard it and woke. My parents and my sister woke, but I slept. After that we never camped or hiked the high country without at least a handgun and more often a rifle.
The point of telling you this is that I am not someone who did not grow up with weapons. I don't cower at weapons, but I also don't feel safe around a citizen who carries - whether openly or concealed (but at least out in the open I know you have it). Because I don't know if that person has a hero complex, knows how to accurately access a situation, is a racist or a bigot which will cloud his/her judgement, or has had some major life changing event that has dumped him or her from "functioning [law abidding] human being" to "dangerous person in need of mental health intervention."
I don't want your guns, your clips or your ammo. But I DO WANT CHANGE!
And I expect somethings in return.
Here's what I want, I'll make my demands very clear and hopefully unambiguously.
I want all public and public charter schools in the US to have safety assessments done and where they don't already have "visitor sequestration" the school should be remodeled.
"Visitor Sequestration" is a process by which all visitors to the school, well everyone who comes to the school after first bell, can only enter at one door and is met with a "doctor's office" set up.
As I wrote in a comment yesterday
There is a "doctor's window" to the office where they see you and talk to you. You are not outside being "buzzed in" (which was the case at my son's 4th grade school). You are there, they see you and talk to you directly. the only doors in the waiting room are the front doors which aren't locked and the security doors leading into the school which are always locked requiring either electronic card, code or to be buzzed in to get passed.
Yes, he [Lanza] could of and probably would have shot up the school office through the doctor's window BUT it would have given those in the ancillary offices enough time to alert for a lock down and to alert the police.
Whenever I come to pick up my son during school I sign in, tell them through the window who I want and then go sit down while they get him.
Likewise if I need to or have an appointment with a teacher I tell the person on the other side of the doctors office window, and go sit down until the teacher comes and escorts me to the room.
At NO time am I allowed just to roam through the halls - and they know me, I've had at least one kid in this school for about 12 years.
The problem with just the buzzer at the front door is that once through, often the person has the "run of the place"
In the school my youngest son went to 4th grade - had been newly remodeled, as in gut everything and start from the superstructure.
The office is in the middle of the building, you have to be buzzed in and they see you via video camera - but once in you have complete run of the school - you even pass the cafeteria on your way to the office.
The set up always bothered me. They had closed an older school (circa 1929?) that my older kids went to, that actually had "visitor sequestration" - I wasn't used to it coming from the west where we had nothing like it .. now I think it's the only way to go
The entry way of the school my son now attends was built a year ago.
Not only does it deal with a massacre situation but also helps with things like child abduction by a non-custodial parent (which is something I have also dealt with in my older children). A school cannot, today, because considered a safe and secure environment if anyone buzzed into the front door can walk free through the school once inside.
How would I pay for it?
After 9-11 we spared no expense to remodel airports and to upgrade scanners. It's too bad Bush and the Republicans decided to deplete the surplus which many of us considered a "rainy day fund." But I also don't want my demands held hostage by Republicans wanting to gut other things to "pay for it."
I want the gun show loop hole closed. And I want guns, clips and ammo taxed where ever they are sold.
We tax cigarettes to pay for health care. We can tax guns, clips and ammo to pay for the fall out of our heavily armmed violent society.
But that's not all. I want that tax to help pay for mental health care and assistance for families with children who need assistance.
I want there to be regular mental health assessments for children, starting from kindergarten.
Too soon? Because of bullying I wanted to commit suicide from the age of 6.
I didn't know that my youngest son's school does that and only found out because of a phone call about a concern they had. My son was having problems getting over the death of a pet. They wanted to make sure we knew, because often pre-teens and teens keep that and other issues from their parents. They wanted to talk about options.
Fortunately we already knew and were working on it.
I know there are rwparents who will object saying that it's government control, big government, etc. Fine, homeschool your kids or put them in a private school, you have options. This issue is too big, and the consequences to dire to for your objections. If your only offering is "put God back in school," you have nothing to give to the solutions. So be quiet!
I want mental health to go on steroids.
The brain is an organ of the body, and like all organs it can have issues, and it can fail. But we treat Stage-4 Liver disease (cyrosis of the liver) as less a moral failing than we treat mental health.
I my dairy about my cousin's suicide and my clinical depressions I said
He had been depressed, but I didn't know. Being more than 1,500 miles away from other family members you sometimes don't get news. And for our family, maybe like yours too, depression or any other mental illness is treated by shame and hushed tones.
And he is dead, for all the silence, he is dead.
It wasn't like there wasn't someone who knew, someone who'd been through the depths of clinical depression before. Someone who thought she had chosen the more lethal of the two medicines, but did not. Someone who, if they'd had known, if they'd have asked, would have been there in a heart beat.
Maybe I wouldn't have saved him, maybe he would have been to far gone in his depression. We'll never know, because they never knew. My family doesn't talk about such things.
In stark contrast another one of our cousin's had a brain tumor, and we all knew. We all talked about it, we all looked for cures, either through the internet or hearing something from a friend of a friend, we all knew. We all fought, each in our own way.
She didn't survive. But we all knew her brain illness, we all knew it involved the brain. We all were told. She died a few years before he did.
But we didn't talk about this, this brain illness. To get a tumor is solid, concrete, okay. To have, as I believe, your body stop producing the chemicals needed to keep your brain healthy, is shameful, secret -- shhhh!
We don't treat diabetes that way.
My parents knew about what had happened to me, but some how in updating her brothers as to the status of her children and grandchildren that was missed. And he too didn't tell her.
In exchange for not going after your guns, your ammo clips and your ammo - not going after control, you will become a champion of mental health. You will work to remove the stigma.
The NRA will throw it's weight to a long term campaign, to educate people about mental health, and normalize (without stigma or shame) accessing it, especially for children and young adults.
You will champion the ACA (Obamacare) and work to fully fund mental health. You will make sure no family and no child has to do without due to an issue of lack of access.
Think it will cost too much? The shooting massacres this country deals with almost every month, the 38 gun deaths this country every day are more expensive.
You will make this 180 degree turn, and you will do this in exchange for not going after more control. Because you and I know you have demagogued this issue so much with people who are easily brought to fear, paranoia (which you are largely responsible for) and racism that a blood bath is going to ensue.
The taxes will be too high to accomplish all of this? Good! They will be high then.
It will have the effect of reducing gun and ammo sales? Really?!! /snark
Because otherwise my first demand for gun control is to make it illegal for someone to own a gun without also owning a gun locker. And just how would we know. Well, for an application for an in-home licensed day care there are in home visits to check for safety.
I'm fine with making that necessary for gun owners.
If it had been in place Nancy Lanza, 6 other adults and 20 children, and Adam may still be alive.