No guns

06/10/2022

Listening to the President address the nation tonight, I pivoted from what I wanted to discuss to focus on his call to action. Stop selling guns to children!! I want to take it one step further, stop selling guns period!! For many wonderful years, I worked at the Yeshivah of Flatbush as a 7th grade social studies teacher; a job that I loved. If I say so myself, I was pretty good at it. What I liked best about teaching social studies was the ability to take real time events and turn them into lessons that got the kids engaged and involved. Teaching the constitution to middle school age kids is no easy task. The challenges of teaching the ⅗ compromise still rattles me; a slave counted as ⅗ of a person. That terrible concept is no longer an issue as slavery was thankfully abolished with the Civil War. Yet, the constitutional power that most challenged the kids was the “right to bear arms” amendment. Even in those days, the idea that every man, woman or child can buy a gun with little to no background check, did not sit well with my impressionable 12 year old students. What to do about it? That was the challenge I threw to my students. At that time, about 1992, before Columbine, a local TV station accepted entries for short opinion essays. These essays were turned into a short 60 second commercial. Let me say here, that I only taught honors classes and at Flatbush that was both a pleasure and a challenge. Those kids were smart and ambitious and the idea that they could be on TV, well in the age before the internet and Instagram, it did not not get much better than that. Sure enough even in such a competitive market, Karen Z nailed the opportunity. Her whole class and teachers loaded onto a bus and traveled to the studio in Newark, New Jersey to watch her performance. I can still savor the awesome feeling of accomplishment, pride and excitement we all felt that day. Karen was well spoken and incredible. Despite being just 12 years old, her 60 second talk came across as poised, articulate and on point. The topic, Abolish Guns! Karen is about 42 years old now; her arguments for implementing gun control shared as a 12 year old, still resonate and ring true all these years later. There are so many dead and wounded that could have been saved had attention been paid. Nothing, nothing at all has changed despite the carnage and the veracity of her predictions. Why? Why? Why? How many more have to be sacrificed before the laws are fixed? I have not done this in a very long time, I used to be really good at it, but I’m seriously thinking of digging in and working with our students to get them working and on the bandwagon to demand change in the gun laws. Think about it, in the last several weeks, there have been three mass shootings with one in a school where first graders were killed in cold blood. How long can we idly stand by and stay silent? Don’t we owe it to our own and our children’s future to stop this madness and once and for all finally galvanize our friends, neighbors, colleagues and families to say No more? What do you think, I’m ready are you? Shabbat Shalom, Chag Somaiach Praying for peace everywhere. ReplyForward