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Mass Shootings And Children
Those words shouldn’t even go together
I want to write about mass shootings and gun control, but where to start?
Before Columbine and many of the 250 other mass shootings we’ve had in America in recent years, I talked a guy down who was waiting in front of the school where I worked and where my son attended.
The man was waiting for his estranged wife to arrive to pick up their children. A school bus driver alerted us that he had a gun. This was before 2004, when congress allowed the assault weapons ban to lapse, so assault weapons were still illegal. He carried some type of handgun, which I watched him slip into his pocket as I approached.
My approach as a trained therapist and an Aikido black belt was to walk toward him slowly and talk as softly and non-threateningly as I could manage. There is no actual defense against a gun. I was terrified, but also angry. Showing either feeling was not an option. I don’t even remember now what I said to him, or what we talked about. Probably about his children, in an effort to get him to focus on the damage to them if he shot their mother or anyone else in front of them. Of course, we had kept all the children…
