I would give my life for the lives of my students, your children. Would you give up your guns for mine?.

I spent the last several hours considering how to compose the words that follow.  I spent the last several days reading news articles, scanning social media posts and comments, viewing photos and videos.  And I spent several minutes listening to the profound nothingness that filled my classroom last Thursday morning as my students and I bowed our heads in a moment of silence for the victims of yet another school shooting.

But that is the last time I will honor such victims in silence; silence has gotten us nowhere in the last nineteen years of school shootings since Columbine High School shattered our illusions of school safety in 1999.  According to Jugal K. Patel, a writer for The New York Times who used data from the Gun Violence Archive, since 20 first graders and six adults were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, “there have been at least 239 school shootings nationwide. In those episodes, 438 people were shot, 138 of whom were killed.”

The recent tragedy at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida is the culmination of a trifecta of issues that have yet to be effectively discussed or remedied in this country: white nationalism, mental health, and quite obviously, gun control. And equally tragic is the banter that has ensued since last Wednesday’s events, leaving 17 people dead at the hands of 19 year old Nikolas Cruz, armed with a legally purchased semi-automatic AR-15 assault rifle and loaded magazines.

As with most issues that plague this country, what has the potential to unite citizens ultimately becomes divisive, destructive, and counter-productive.

At the center of the gun control debate is a long-held battle regarding the second amendment: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

The wording itself has been problematic since its inception, as the clause refers to both a “well regulated militia” and “the people,” which are not synonymous.  Despite its semantic interpretations and variations being disputed at even the Supreme Court level, the right to bear arms has been extended to the average citizen since the Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791.

And therein lies the problem.  We are a nation debating a right, an amendment that came into existence more than 200 years ago.  Times were different then, and so were guns.

In 1791, our nation was only eight years removed from the end of the Revolutionary War, largely fought on what was to become American soil.  The threat of tyrannical oppression, opposition, and retaliation was a near and present danger; the need for armed protection was a reality of proximity; and the establishment of a standing army as well as municipal and statewide police forces were yet to be.

Even so, the men of 1791 were not armed with semi-automatic rifles; they had muskets with a magazine capacity of one round and a capability of firing three rounds per minute.  Today’s average AR-15 has a magazine capacity of 30 rounds and a capability of firing 45 rounds per minute.

Regardless of such differences in weaponry, there is an inherent problem in this country’s reliance upon centuries old ideologies and beliefs.  That we are debating in 2018 an amendment from 1791 – when slavery was “legal,” when women were denied every right given to white men, when our newfound government was not even ten years old – is an absurdity in itself.

Times change, and if we learned anything from our founding fathers, despite their many mistakes, it is that “we the people” have the right to demand a better and more perfect law, a better and more perfect society.  That is the founding truth of this country that so many seem to forget as they hypocritically cling to old establishments.  Our founding fathers were rebels and revolutionaries, not defenders and enforces of outdated policies and practices, especially those that were oppressive to the masses.

But even those who are not regurgitating archaic rhetoric to defend their right to bear arms are failing to rely on obvious truths and modern statistics.  For the prominent argument appears to be that one has the right to bear arms as a means of self-defense, protection, and safety.

If that threat comes from a corrupt government or a foreign adversary, handheld weapons will do little in the face of heavy artillery, drones, tanks, and the like.  If that threat comes from individual encounters, statistics reveal that, in fact, “guns are not used millions of times each year in self-defense.”

As the Harvard Injury Control Research Center found, “the claim of many millions of annual self-defense gun uses by American citizens is invalid. Victims use guns in less than 1% of contact crimes, and women never use guns to protect themselves against sexual assault (in more than 300 cases).  Victims using a gun were no less likely to be injured after taking protective action than victims using other forms of protective action.” In fact, the data collected and analyzed by the research center found that firearms are used “far more often to frighten and intimidate” than they are “in self-defense” or to “thwart crime.”

Further illustrating the disparity is the Violence Policy Center’s analysis of federal crime and health data from 2012, which showed that of the 1.2 million cases in which murder would have been deemed as self-defense, there were only 259 “justifiable homicides.”  Yet, that same year there were “8,342 criminal homicides using guns, 20,666 suicides with guns, and 548 fatal unintentional shootings.”

The simple truth is that guns are overwhelmingly used as murder weapons by offenders, not defenders.

That is not to say, however, that all gun-owners are offenders.  They most certainly are not.  Yet their very rights and possession allow for guns to get into the wrong hands, as the same aforementioned analysis found that approximately “232,000 guns are stolen each year, about 172,000 of them during burglaries.” Here again, the guns were not only not used in self-defense, but they were taken from the “good guys” by the hands of criminals.

More alarming is that the United States Secret Service deduced that 68% of “school shooters got their guns from relatives or at home.” Even without theft, however, someone as young as Nikolas Cruz is able to legally purchase a firearm in this country, a semi-automatic firearm to be exact.  And thanks to President Trump repealing the rule to block mentally ill people from buying guns, there seems to be no system of control except that of capitalism and the NRA.

So I am quite explicitly addressing the one-third minority of Americans who own a gun.

Because as far as I know, gun-owners and their guns have done nothing to prevent or stop school shootings from happening.  They and their self-defense, semi-automatic weapons have done nothing to defend, protect, or save the children and teachers who fill classrooms and schools like my own.  What they have done – overwhelmingly so – is continued to defend their second amendment right; to protect the laws that allow for the manufacturing, purchase, and use of AR 15s and the like; to save their guns from being banned, controlled, regulated.

While gun-owners are not the villains here, the laws that protect them and the objects they possess are statistically proven to be villainous to our society.  It is true that guns do not kill people, that people kill people.  Guns have no agency to fire without a human being pulling the trigger.  But let’s not make it so easy for them.  Let’s not fill millions of households with objects that serve no other purpose than to murder.

And let’s be honest about how often mental illness goes unnoticed, undiagnosed, and untreated since mental health is being used as a scapegoat to avoid talking about gun safety in this country.  Let’s be clear about how complicated, complex, and controversial it is to distinguish between the mentally ill and the mentally disturbed, between those who pose no threat to others or themselves and those who do.  Let’s be real about the fact that not every murderer who “bears arms” – whether in our schools, our cities, or our neighboring households – has a predetermined or even existing mental illness.

Let’s admit that the average “good” citizen who bears arms has done nothing to markedly change the statistics on gun violence – of any kind – for the better.  But “good” laws have, as is evidenced in the data published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health: “130 studies in 10 countries suggests that . . . the simultaneous implementation of laws targeting multiple firearms restrictions is associated with reductions in firearm deaths.”

Conversely, let’s look at how “bad” laws or a lack of laws can in fact cause atrocities.  Consider the legal manufacturing and distribution of OxyContin.  Consider the pharmaceutical companies as the NRA.  Consider well-meaning doctors as “good guy” gun-owners.  Consider how prescriptions written since 1996 have caused an undeniable opioid epidemic and millions of deaths in our country – legally – because laws are not always written for the people they are meant to protect.

Let’s also consider that surrendering to these facts and sacrificing something here may be the best way to “provide for the common defence” of oneself and this country, to “insure domestic Tranquility,” to honor the Preamble to the Constitution, rather than the second amendment.

Perhaps your place of employment needs to be targeted before you’ll understand my plea.  Perhaps you need to know what it feels like to see more than 100 students five days a week for 10 months a year before you understand how easy it is to love a child who is not your own as your own.  Perhaps you should stand inside my classroom, inside our school buildings – without their metal detectors, bullet-proof windows, and student ID swipes, or with their one armed police officer and three unarmed security guards – before you realize the vulnerability of a building not protected by our government.  Perhaps you should consider that your right to bear arms is robbing mothers and fathers of their right to bear their children in their arms.

And perhaps you can dig deep in that patriotic soul of yours when a fellow American, a 12-year veteran teacher of your nation’s children says: I would give my life for the lives of my students, your children. Would you give up your guns for mine?

Angela Albright is a writer of both fiction and nonfiction, as well as a high school English teacher and university professor. A lover of words and language, she believes in the power of written and spoken discourse — as entities of connectivity, enlightenment, and revolution. Currently working on two books, she is using her voice in such ways and anticipates publication in 2018 and 2020, respectively. You can connect with her on Instagram here.

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