The Willow Glen Resident

Point of View

Deborah Taylor-Hollis

We can't change kids, so get rid of guns

May 21: Oh God, oh God, oh God. Today a sixth-grader in Richmond brought a loaded, cocked gun to his elementary school, showed it off and threatened to kill a friend who turned him in. Oh God, oh God, I wish this wasn't happening. Not here. Not ever. Especially not now.

I must have written this column 20 times, and each time I never turned it in. I just couldn't find enough humor in the situation to merit my normally flippant standards. And now this.

The same day, a 12-year-old went to a school in Oregon and blew away as many people as he could. One died, more than two dozen were injured. He also had guns and ammunition. Later, it's learned that he killed his parents at home first--because he'd had trouble in school, the most recent problem being the handgun he had brought onto campus the day before.

Children can't control their emotions, their rages. That's what childhood is supposed to be all about: learning, from preschool to college, how to deal with anger, love, hate, fear, rage, happiness, losing and winning gracefully. We will never be able to say our teenagers are taught well enough to protect them from the inherent violence of self--that is what growing up is all about.

When that white-hot anger blows up in them, they do things without warning, without any long-range thought, without any care about what will happen tomorrow. They live in the moment, forever in their childhood until that day, sometime in their 20s, when they suddenly realize they haven't lived in that land for quite a while, and they have no idea when it slipped away and responsibility and adulthood moved in.

When children get mad, they use whatever is at hand to hurt back. As toddlers it's their fists, their teeth, their hands. Then, they learn the words that can hurt, the nasty things that cut to the core. But they also learn to act out, bigger and better. No one can change that--ever.

Don't let anyone kid you that "zero tolerance" laws will change kids. Don't let them make you think that "parental education" will change kids. That's like saying we can grow them into adults in eight years instead of 20.

When an angry teen acts out, he or she will take a car and drive off a cliff, grab a knife and stab at the anger, take the blind rage and use anything to turn it outward--or inward, with pills, ropes, car exhaust, swan dives off handy buildings. When adults in society do these same things, we know they just "never grew up." They never left the pain of adolescence behind.

I no longer care about gun rights, self-protection, the NRA and all the stuff their members have handed down for so long that we actually have begun to believe it all, to debate it all and to concede some of their louder points. My son starts school this fall, and his kindergarten looks like a big target to me. I can't drive by there now without seeing what could happen here, anywhere, right now, tomorrow. It is impossible to ignore.

I will no longer listen to that junk about how "gun education" is good for kids, or how everyone in a gun household is now "responsible." I just want to get rid of every gun in every household, right now. Period.

I want to know that there isn't one rifle, handgun, Uzi, shotgun, airgun, not one deadly gun left in Willow Glen that some angry child might someday use on my son. I want to know that every "collector" has sold his stockpile before the thieves break in and use those guns on our streets. I want to know that every teenager in town can get burning mad, but there's no gun in his home to pull out, load up and take on a walking nightmare of my elementary school. Period.

I don't want "defense" explanations; they don't wash anymore. I can't put my child in a bulletproof box for the next 15 years, so the next best thing is to say that guns are no longer something I will tolerate. Ever.

And I don't want to hear from anyone defending weapons. It's one big, long, well-entrenched, flat-Earth lie that they don't kill people. And they do it faster and more efficiently than anything else a kid can put in his pocket when he's mad at the world. I don't want my 4-year-old baby on your accident list.

You want protection? Get a dog. So far, no one's set one of those loose on the school and killed several classmates and teachers before anybody could stop it.

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