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Unrestricted gun culture needs to stop — now

This past year, I led an after-school class on argument and critical reasoning with a group of gifted eighth-graders in Compton.
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June 24, 2015

This past year, I led an after-school class on argument and critical reasoning with a group of gifted eighth-graders in Compton. The final was an in-class debate on gun control. There were passionate arguments on both sides, which is what I’d hoped for, and as the kids prepared, I reminded them that all arguments needed to include evidence. We reviewed what counted as evidence: facts from reputable sources, scientific data, verifiable statistics and even something that you had personally witnessed, as long as it was an incident and not an opinion somebody had expressed.

A bright, friendly kid with spiked hair seemed to realize something. “Does it count as evidence that my family saw someone shot and killed at the park this weekend?” he asked me.

The idea that this kid, whose energy and charm never failed to warm up the classroom, whose family of six includes a 9-year-old national debate champ, an adorable 5-year-old and two of the most devoted parents I’ve ever known, had had to witness a murder just because they went out on a picnic was so horrifying to me that I couldn’t speak.

“It was some guy at another table,” his 10-year-old sister explained, with her usual cheery, dimpled smile, as if the distance of a few feet made it all right. “Somebody just started shooting at him.”

I looked at the other kids in the group, fresh-faced brainiacs so earnest that sometimes I stayed an extra half-hour just because they liked a discussion so much. “Have any of the rest of you ever seen someone shot?”

Out of seven children in that room, only one had not witnessed a shooting.  

One girl had seen a woman shoot and kill her husband in the Food4Less parking lot. Another had seen a guy shot on her street. 

I found myself almost unable to speak. “That’s … unacceptable,” was all I could stammer.

Later that month, as I was teaching a creative-writing workshop at a nearby high school in South L.A., I asked the kids to write about a moment that had been a turning point in their lives. One of the boys, a friendly gossip with a 3.9 GPA, wrote about the time he was in middle school and one of his friends was run over right outside his house when somebody shot the driver of a car — the driver died, the car went out of control and slammed into a nearby tree, killing his 13-year-old friend.  

High-school kids are more in touch with their emotions than my eighth-graders. This time, we had to stop the class. Many of the students lived nearby; many of them remembered the incident. Some of them were nonchalant, but a couple of them were crying. We finished the class with silent writing. It was the only way I could think of to honor what had happened.

And as we all know, just days ago, a young white man walked into a church, prayed for an hour with a group of African-American congregants and then shot nine of them to death. 

We do not live in a war zone. But sometimes it feels as if we do. When are we going to stop the unrestricted access to guns that make this country rife with gang warfare, mass shootings and terrorist hate crimes? 

Why are we willing to live in a country where the gun-related homicide rate is by far the highest in the developed world, more than four times higher than the second-highest country, Switzerland?  Of the 644 million civilian-owned guns in the world, 42 percent belong to Americans.  And though most gun owners say they feel safer with a gun, statistically, those guns don’t protect the owners very well; of the 29,618,300 violent crimes between 2007 and 2011, only .79 percent of the victims protected themselves with a gun or with the threat of using one. 

Dylann Roof, despite being the author of a neo-Nazi website with a white supremacist agenda urging readers to take “drastic action” against Blacks, despite posting racist symbols on Facebook, despite even a recent prior conviction for trespassing and drug possession, was able to walk into a store and, after filling out some paperwork, buy a .45 Glock capable of loading 10 bullets at a time, yet small enough to tuck into his fanny pack. He could easily have bypassed the paperwork just by purchasing the weapon at a gun show, but clearly he correctly assumed that nobody would ever take that background check very seriously.

How many innocent people are going to die before we put a stop to this madness?

We need to enact real gun controls now. We need to demand a country where our children can have a picnic, shop for food or look out their living-room window without witnessing a murder, where their church, synagogue or mosque can be a refuge, not a terrorist site. The pope has stated publicly that gun manufacturers cannot be Christians, because their actions are in defiance of Christian values. I hope we can argue that this bloodshed, and the gun lobby that enables it, and the toothless laws that allow it, and our own inaction, are not consistent with Jewish values, either. We have seen the horrific results of unrestricted gun culture. What are we going to do about it?

Ellie Herman is a writer, teacher and life coach. She blogs at

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