A gross display of inhumanity

Austin Belet, Opinions Editor

“It’s going to happen again.”

Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said these words in a recent presentation in defense of the Guardian Program that the state had implemented in 2018. 

The Coach Aaron Feis Guardian Program is a program designed by the State of Florida that would allow personnel employed by the school district and who carry a concealed carry permit to become a “Guardian”. To become a Guardian, the individual must undergo a psychological evaluation, a combined 288 hours of training, and result-focused, live-fire test at a range. 

Are you kidding me? 

We are now living in a country that, despite including the phrase “domestic tranquility” in our constitution, now has travel advisories leveled against us. 

Our biggest danger is our own unwillingness to accept that we are destroying our country from the inside out due to material fetishes.

“The Second Amendment says…”

Yeah, it says that we get to have guns to protect ourselves from a tyrannical government, I hear you. That same document also implicitly endorses the concept of slavery, so is that really the best arguement you have? 

“Well we have the 13th amendment that got rid of slavery!”

So we are able to change constitutional amendments then? We should when we see a problem! We as a society recognized the gross injustice that we had inflicted upon an entire race of people – which was only (kind of) reconciled after we were literally killing ourselves over “states rights”.

My point is that we are being ignorant as a society over gun use. The idea that the constitutional amendment that provides for our country to have a well organized militia is being bastardized to enable someones wet dream about owning heavy firepower a la Rambo is insulting and a gross display of inhumanity.

People are dying, daily.

Not just from school shootings and not just from bigoted attacks. People are dying from an uninformed handling of firearms, people are dying from self-inflicted gunshot wounds, people are dying from drunken mistakes at a party. 

The Guardian program, while well intentioned, doesn’t do anything to solve the problem but make warzones out of our previously safe institutions. 

We should be focusing on mental health awareness, gun licensing practices, and much more stringent laws dictating who gets to own a firearm. This should be the pivotal moment in our history where our government says enough is enough and protects its citizens. The influence of gun lobbies shouldn’t be what allows people day in and day out to die by way of a bullet.

It is an insult to those who have died at the hands of these horrific attacks and these tragic accidents to simply fight firearm with firearm. 

Rolling over and accepting that “this is gonna happen again,” is jackassery at it’s finest. If we were actually trying to do something about this as a country wide epidemic, then we should be attacking the root cause: people can open weapons that we should not allow them to own.

If you are as disgusted about the lack of substantive handling of true gun reform and public safety efforts, you can reach out to March for Our Lives to get involved with holding our governments accountable. 

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