As March ended, we counted our dead. Three nine-year old children at the Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, were blown apart by assault weapons in the hands of an insane, young woman. She also shredded the bodies of three adults with her semiautomatic weapons, but that has become so routine an item on the evening news that we hardly recoil at the horror of their demise. The heavily armed tactical team sent in to save our children from this week’s equally heavily armed murderer attributed the deaths of those three adults to their being in a hallway. We live in a country where it is dangerous to stand in a hallway.
Most of the children in this school survived the attack by following the disaster drill for an ‘Active Shooter’ they had practiced just in case a lunatic with hundreds of rounds of ammunition and AR-15 type rifles blew through the locked doors of their school and shot at anyone not hiding in a safe room. This was the sixteenth school shooting of 2023, and it is only April.
When I went to elementary school, we had fire drills. The school principal would always choose a sunny day for the annual drill. No one ended up with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after briefly marching into the school yard, but that was long before Charlton Heston vowed that the government could only get his beloved weapons by prying them out of his cold, dead hands, a sentiment apparently shared by the baby killer Audrey Hale.
The Nashville school shooting was a relatively minor incident in a year that has taken an enormous toll on our children. In 2022 deaths related to firearms exceeded all other single causes of death in the 1 to 18 year old age group in America. Nineteen percent of all childhood deaths in that age group were related to firearms. In 1970 there were fewer than 25 school shootings or gun related incidents for grades kindergarten to 12. In 2021, these same schools experienced nearly 250 incidents. More children died from these weapons last year than from automobile accidents.
We are alone in the world in nations not at war that lose so many children each year to these lethal devices. And yet our legislators refuse to do anything of consequence to stop the carnage. One congressman being interviewed after the Nashville murders insisted that “nothing can be done.” What he should have said is that “nothing will be done.”
Americans want to protect their children and their neighbors and themselves from well-armed idiots and madmen intent on killing as many people as possible. Owning a gun or rifle or AR-15 obviously does not provide any real protection, since even well-trained and well-armed police get shot and killed at routine traffic stops and home visits. No one expects to be confronted by a shooter until the first rounds are discharged. Obviously the possession of firearms gives many of our fellow citizens a false sense of security or at least superiority. Unfortunately, having a gun or a rifle provides no assurance of survival in any armed conflict.
Someday the second amendment to the Constitution, an amendment adopted to help protect against slave revolts and foreign incursions at a time our nation did not have plans for a permanent army, will be repealed. Until such time, our representatives in Congress must do everything possible to protect us and our children from all types of murderers and maniacs. If they believe they cannot perform this task, they should return to the homes they left to serve us and let men and women with spines take their place.
Those attending Washington D.C. banquets and backroom bribery sessions [aka fund raisers] routinely interrupt their indolence after school shootings to step before microphones and solemnly announce that their “thoughts and prayers” are with the families of the victims. “Thoughts and prayers” are nonsense to parents who have lost a child. Politicians should be banned from ever uttering that phrase after a school shooting. These are not four letter words, but they are just as obscene as any sexual or scatological terms when they are offered as a response to a school shooting. These anencephalic puppets will then recommend arming the teachers, installing blast resistant doors, stationing armed guards on every floor of the school, or starting every school day with weapons checks and prayers that the children will make it home alive. And we pay them for these insipid recommendations.
Many of our fellow citizens insist that we must do everything possible to protect the viability of a cluster of cells that might eventually develop into a human being. Dozens of states have adopted laws that protect these embryos without regard to the health or circumstances of the pregnant woman. It defies logic that many of these same states find it impossible to pass laws that protect our children after they are born. They oppose background checks and restricting the sales of guns and ammunition to people with mental illnesses and histories of violent behavior. They oppose the registering, insuring, or testing of people purchasing firearms that they routinely require for people operating motor vehicles. They oppose restricting the number of guns and rifles an individual can purchase or otherwise acquire each year. These lawmakers have argued that more guns available to more people will make all of us safer. America put that hypothesis to the test over the past 50 years and found it to be false.
After the Columbine massacre, many Americans believed that numerous and permanent laws restricting the purchase and possession of firearms were inevitable. They were wrong. They did not realize the power and generosity of gun manufacturers and organizations like the NRA that bend our legislators to their will. Obviously, none of the Congressmen and women eager to profit from the largesse of the gun lobby had children attending Columbine, Sandy Hook, Robb Elementary [Uvalde], or the Covenant School. It is easy to rationalize inaction in the face of repeated tragedies when the victims of your complicity are far away and unfamiliar and those enabling the sacrifice of our children are just down the street signing checks.
Dr. Lechtenberg is an Easton resident who graduated from Tufts University and Tufts Medical School in Massachusetts and subsequently trained at The Mount Sinai Hospital and Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in Manhattan. He worked as a neurologist at several New York Hospitals, including Kings County and The Long Island College Hospital, while maintaining a private practice, teaching at SUNY Downstate Medical School, and publishing 15 books on a variety of medical topics. He worked in drug development in the USA, as well as in England, Germany, and France.
