The conversation I dream of having with my kids about guns

“The weird thing was that we had just been learning about Malala, and how she got shot in the face, and then we were hiding next to the bookshelf because someone might have a gun and be coming into our school.”

My daughters—6 and 9 years old—were hunched over their instant ramen, slurping up their noodles on a Friday night. This was my 9-year-old, almost casually reporting on the day that they had just had at our neighborhood public school in Oakland.

“Ms. C said, ‘This is not a drill,’ on the loudspeaker. She sounded really serious,” my 6 year-old added, not to be left out of the narrativizing. “We tried to be quiet but it was hard. We were under our desks for so long!”

When I first heard there had been a lockdown at school, I was frustrated. I had learned from listening to Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action, that school shooter drills mostly serve to traumatize children, not prepare them for crisis. I wondered briefly who I might talk to about this research. Then my husband clarified, “No, it was a real lockdown.”

The nearby high school had a gun threat and both principals decided they needed to lock the schools down. No gun was found. Everything turned out okay. For us. This time.

Except not really, because we now live in a world where my 9-year-old daughter casually references the synchronicity of learning about Malala Yousafzai right before she is also hiding from an armed shooter, a world where our weekend was filled with pretend lockdowns led by my 6-year-old—something that my child psychologist friend assures me is a healthy way of processing in a deeply unhealthy world.

And now Nashville. (And before that Michigan. And before that Texas…) When I learned that three 9-year-old had been murdered in their school, I of course pictured my own 9-year-old, crouching near the bookshelf, her brilliant, indefatigable teacher assuring the kids it would be okay, even though she, herself, was having an out-of-body experience realizing that she was potentially the only thing standing between weaponized violence and these children. These children that she loves. These children that she has taught to multiply and write essays and forgive one another. These children that are their parents’ whole hearts, every single one of them, and she knows this and now she is asking these raucous hearts to be as quiet as possible so that a person with a gun doesn’t find their portable with its crayfish and its buckets of graphic novels and its handmade star art with all the things the kids are proud of (I am a star because I am unique. I am a star because I can read. I am a star because I listen).

Which is to say, in this classroom, in every classroom in America, there is a whole intricate world of life-giving layers—especially by spring. These kids and their teachers have spent months and months building their shared world, chipping away at lesson plans, surviving dance battles and trading Pokemon secrets, taking field trips, trading snacks, re-imagining friendships and rivalries, making mistakes, trying again, supporting one another, falling apart, coming back together. The stuff of life. The stuff of shared, hard, beautiful life.

And then death comes. Keeps coming. Enters these beautiful life-giving worlds. And we—as a country—keep putting our hands together in prayer for the victims or shrugging our shoulders as if there is nothing we can do.

I would like my daughters to have never huddled under their desks or behind the bookshelves. But even more, now, I would like to teach my daughters that there was a moment when this country honored life. I would like say: for some people, not us, but for some people, guns are precious. They have fond family memories of hunting or they see them as a symbol of something core to their love of America and its values. Even though we don’t share these memories or this association with guns, we understand that some people do. And we are so grateful that these people—the ones who hold guns as precious—understand that children and educators, that every human life, is so worthwhile that they choose to create wise limitations around the guns they love so that people can live. They got to keep their symbol and it became even more precious because of the wise limits surrounding it. We got to have our children.

Prophetic essayist Kiese Laymon wrote: “We have not loved children enough in this country to change our relationships to violence.” It’s true. But we can. We could. They deserve for us to be broken open and into action.

That’s my dream—to one day have that conversation with my children about when the country’s grown-ups finally pierced the veil, understood that we would never understand one another completely, but we could still agree on wise limitations that would save lives and our very own American souls.

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