We need to stop gun violence in the United States. One year ago this July I got a text, probably one of the worst texts that I could possibly get from my daughter. “There is a shooter here.” I didn't know what to do. What can I do? I instantly gave her a call and then started thinking “wait… should I give her a call? That will make her iPad ring. That could alert the shooter to her location. What should I do?” The facetime call connected; her end was totally dark. I immediately heard her crying. My heart was pounding, this is an unthinkable situation. Within seconds of asking what was going on I see Eleanor’s face come into view, her face was being lit up by the screen of her ipad and she's crying. I ask her “What is going on?”  She said “there is a shooter here.” I asked where she was, if she was safe and to talk to me. Eleanor was doing what she learned in school for active shooter drills. She was in her room with the door locked and the lights off. She was at home with her mother. Her mother was going around the house locking all of the outside doors. The situation, which we learned later, was that a nearby jewelry store was robbed, the robbers shot some people and then fled into the nearby homes to escape. The police were out searching for them, using helicopters and on foot, alerting the community what was going on.

The next week Eleanor was outside learning to ride her bike on the grass by the house.  She was very happy, very excited, she was doing it! … Then there were shots. She could hear these shots. There was a domestic dispute in a house across the street from the park where a wife shot at her husband three times. Eleanor called me before the police were there and she was crying, sobbing, and scared, saying that all she wanted to do was be outside riding her bike. She was terrified. Why is this such an issue? Why are we allowing this to happen?

In the United States in the year 2021 48,830 people were killed by guns and over 100,000 were injured and survived. There is variation per year but in my lifetime, 37 years, that equates to 1.6 Million people in the United States have died due to guns. An additional  3.6 million were injured and survived. That is a war zone. The school shootings, mall shootings, domestic shootings, the shootings at comedy clubs and nightclubs are all absolutely tragic and preventable.

This is constant traumatic stress on all of us, on our children. Millions of people have died in our lifetimes, we are all traumatized by this whether you recognize it or not. It is easy to see in the fears of a child crying because they want to go outside but can not because there are shooters around, gun violence is everywhere. This does not need to happen, it is absurd that so many people are dying each year all around us and nothing is being done about it. Who is killed? Our children, our teenagers, our families and communities. More guns is not the solution, more guns will not protect my 9 year old daughter when there is a shooting. More guns will not solve an active shooter in an elementary school classroom. The solution is not to arm our 9 year olds.

We need to enact change. We need a world where our kids, your kids, your grandkids come up to you after reading a history book and asking if it was really true that people with guns would go into schools and murder children and nobody would do anything. We can not allow this to continue. The time for action is now.