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I last wrote about this topic two years ago after an eighteen-year-old former student fatally shot nineteen students and two teachers at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas. The 2022 article was titled “Way Past Time to Figure This Out,” and I’ll be revisiting some of the things I said then with quite a few updates.

Let me go ahead and say that this is not an anti-gun article. For most of my adult life I have lived with one or more guns in my house. Right now we have one pistol. It does make me feel safer on those rare occasions when I spend the night alone here. Our family is by and large not a hunting family, but I have no problem with responsible hunters.

However, schools must be safe havens, and Lord knows we’ve learned to do what we can. In the two years since Uvalde, our school system has beefed up security even more. For instance: We have installed weapons detectors at our secondary school entrances. We have full-time resource officers (SROs) on every campus. Our staff wear Centegix badges, the same alert system in use at Apalachee High School in Winder, which, together with the presence of SROs, probably kept last week’s tragedy from being even worse.

Active shooter drills and keeping classroom doors locked started here more than 20 years ago after Columbine. In my thirty plus years as a teacher, there were two times (that I know of) when a student who was enrolled in one of my classes purposefully came to school with a gun. Only one of those was in Troup County, and it was way back in the 80s. Thanks to vigilance on the part of staff and students there was no violence.  I’ll also note that these were white males, just as so many mass shooters are.

Columbine was the prologue to so many similar shootings since that I’ve lost count. Losing count and not being able to name them all is horrible in itself. I cannot imagine the trauma of living through a Sandy Hook or Uvalde. And last week it happened in a Georgia community to which people in our community have ties.

Assault-style weapons are now ubiquitous in our country, making it even easier for evil to cause mass casualties, whether on freeways, in schools, malls, music events, movie theaters, or even churches. I hear all the outcry about mental illness and second amendment rights, but as someone who frequents all of the aforementioned places, I’m unmoved by those cries. Mental illness is a worldwide problem, but no country that isn’t war-torn comes close to sharing our out-of-control gun violence.

Here are some things I stand firm on: No 18-year-old should be able to walk into a gun store and walk out with an assault-style gun (Uvalde). A father who gifts his 14-year-old son with a similar weapon (Winder), which is even more unbelievable considering they were both questioned by officers previously about the boy’s possible violent tendencies, should be imprisoned. “Pranksters” who threaten violence in our schools should be quickly arrested and charged (thank you, local law enforcement). And our gun laws need to be tougher. The majority of Americans agree on this.

Legislators, it’s my personal feeling that unless you can present us with a significant number of factual anecdotes about average citizens who exercised their right to bear arms for personal or public defense when no other gun would suffice except for these that can fire multiple rounds in mere seconds, they should only be in the hands of the military and the police. Taking no action only plays into the hands of those who would kill innocents. All of us, and especially our children, deserve better.