America’s Gun: Nineteen Children
We sit at a wooden table in a Japanese restaurant nestled in the Asheville mountains. Potted plants line the windowsills. Through the open kitchen I can see chefs bustling in front of flaming burners, and I hear the clink and crush of ice as the bartender agitates a cocktail shaker from the center bar. My wife takes a sip of her wild juniper, chlorophyll, and fever tree soda water and scrunches her nose, “tastes weird.” A server brings a bowl of bok choy, slices of salmon sashimi, and a bowl of veggie ramen noodles swimming in a salty miso broth.
I’m attempting to capture noodles between my chopsticks when my phone rings. It’s my mother. My parents are watching the children for two nights. She asks in hushed tones whether we have seen the news. I tell her we haven’t. That morning we hiked a trail next to a stream off the Blue Ridge Parkway, the spring growth already enveloping the mountains. We spotted red newts and listened to the riotous birds in the canopy and watched the islands of mist burn off the mountains. Then in the afternoon, I sat on the couch in the rental apartment and read Ford Maddox Ford’s The Good Soldier. My phone sat untouched by the nightstand. No work emails, no news.
“There’s been another school shooting,” she says, her voice shielded from the children. “In Texas—at least nineteen dead.”
I hold her words at bay. Maybe if I don’t believe it, it isn’t true.
“What should we tell the kids?” she asks.
I shake my head, “It’s too much. There’s no way to say it. We’ll talk to them about it later if needed.”
Danielle searches my face. In a moment, our weekend, our lives are altered and our dinner small talk fades into silence.
A foursome at the next table laugh at a shared joke and the bartender pulls a wine glass down from an overhead shelf and a couple at the bar lean into each other, his hand on her knee.
“We need to move,” my wife says, “get our kids out of this country.”
I nod as my mind swirls; disbelief, rage, and grief coalesce. Nineteen children.
We skip dessert and walk back to the hotel, holding hands in the gathering dusk. Clouds range over us as we walk past a Black Lives Matter mural painted on a brick wall and skirt a decaying black snake strewn across the sidewalk. All I can think of is the smell of my daughter's hair and the softness of her body when I kneel to hug her. We walk in silence. There is nothing to say. I am amazed by how numb I feel. Nineteen parents. All I can feel is a heaviness against my body. I am helpless. Helpless against 20 million assault rifles1. Helpless against bullets that eviscerate the bones and organs of small children2. Helpless against the National Rifle Association’s millions of dollars3.
Back at the apartment, we turn on the news feed. This makes 27 school shootings and 212 mass shootings in the United States this year. It’s only May. So far Canada has had 2. Australia 0. I am father and protector to two daughters and a son. And yet I know, in the morning, I will send them back to their American school.
1. Loh, Matthew. “America Has 20 Million AR-15 Style Rifles in Circulation, and More Guns than People in the Country.” Business Insider, Business Insider, 30 May 2022, https://www.businessinsider.com/us-20-million-ar-15-style-rifles-in-circulation-2022-5.
2. Allen, Laveil M. “Examining Gun Reform with x-Ray Vision.” Brookings, Brookings, 27 May 2022, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2022/05/27/examining-gun-reform-with-x-ray-vision/.
3. Bella, Timothy. “After Texas Shooting, Republicans Face Online Anger over NRA Money.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 26 May 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/05/25/school-shooting-uvalde-republicans-nra/.