I started a different post today about something unrelated, and then the news flashed up another school shooting. Again. Less than a month into the school year here in the south. I am lucky right now, I can hear my son upstairs singing as he plays his video games. There are parents in Georgia right now who are facing the unimaginable. They will never hear their kid sing again, there will be no more hugs, kisses goodnight, sarcastic looks when they try to use the lingo of kids today.

I am so tired of thoughts and prayers. I’m so tired of seeing the faces of bereft parents who lost their children far too soon. I’m so tired of knowing my son goes through active shooter drills at school and has since he was in kindergarten. Is there a mental health problem? Yes, but there is also a gun problem. There are children, hell there are adults who have access to weapons that they should not have access too. An irrevocable “solution” that causes so much damage and forever alters lives.

I know, and have known, responsible gun owners. As a single woman living in an subdivision under construction that wasn’t fully occupied I once owned a shotgun. I knew how to store it, I knew how to shoot it, but I also knew that should someone show up with ill intent the sound alone would alert them that I wouldn’t have to be accurate to hit them. When my son was born the gun left the house. I still occasionally will go to a range for target practice, though it’s been quite a while. As a divorced woman living alone in a house with a mid-sized child I considered another shotgun, but opted instead for a robust security system.

I also have known people who had no business owning a single firearm, much less the amount they’d been able to amass. Weapons that no normal hunter would need, that no one should really need for the purposes of home or self-protection. My father had several mental health issues. He also had a legally obtained large collection of guns. He used those guns to hold us in fear as children. I’ve had a gun held to my head. By someone who was supposed to protect me, simply because he was angry about something. I lived a lot of my childhood in fear that at some point he’d snap and shoot one or all of us in a fit of the red rage he was so prone to.

My son lives with the knowledge that he has to train to hide, and make himself small and quiet in case someone, some day, decides to bust into his school with a gun. I live with the knowledge that every single day that he comes home to me safely from school is a day I am lucky. It doesn’t have to be this way. But instead of doing *literally* anything, politicians and lobbyists and gun manufacturers all send out thoughts and prayers, every time, to every new parent inducted to the horrible club we all fear we’ll one day join.

It’s not just the generations, and it is generations at this point, of children, that have suffered losses of classmates who should still be here. It’s the communities that surround them. It’s the children that have to walk past the bodies and blood pools of their classmates. Who will forever fear a loud noise, or dream of the fear they felt in those moments. It’s the parents who fear every text from their child during the school day alerting them that there’s an active shooter in their school, and wondering if that’s the last text they’ll ever get from them.

We are failing our children, horribly, and irrevocably. Every new class of kindergartners that has to learn to hide from a bad person coming to a place they should be excited to go to, a place they should inherently feel safe, a place that for some, is the only real safe place they have is a failure of our society.