Gun Control and Mental Health Care

When I am at home in the US people always ask me if I am afraid to travel by myself in Nepal.  When I am abroad foreign friends say to me, Aren't you afraid to live in the US.

On December 14, 2012 two schools that were attacked by insane people.  One was in Sandy Brook Connecticut  and the other in Chengpin Henan, China.  In the US the man carried a gun.  In China the man wielded a knife.  The 22 children in China survived but 20 children in the US did not!

This following statistic is from the CDC and includes the number of all deaths in the US attributable to firearms whether accidental suicide or gun violence in 2011: 31,347 people.

This is from the Wall Stree Journal, 8 December 2012 -

"The reported number of people treated for gunshot attacks from 2001 to 2011 has grown by nearly half."

We need access to affordable mental health care for the health and well being of our entire community, and we need effective gun control in the US now!

I'm not OK!

“What would you do if a gun man came to your school and started shooting kids?” I asked my children.

“I’d hide behind the door,” my older son said.

“Do you think that all of your classmates could get behind the door with you?” I wondered aloud.

“I know, I’d jump out the window.” my younger son said.

“I hope you wouldn’t jump from the second floor,” I told him. “I think that I would tell everyone to push all of the desks and chairs in front of the door. And, I would tell someone to call the police on their cell phone.”

“Do you think you would ever go back to your school if something like Chardon happened at your school?” I asked

“Nope, no way!” They agreed.

Dear God! Do I really have to have this discussion with my 9 year old and my 14 year old?

Back in 2010 I wrote about living in the center of the DC sniper attacks. At that time I had one preschool child. Parents drove to the door of the preschool and the teachers would send one child out at a time at pick-up in the hope that only one parent and child would be vulnerable to attack. The school was completely locked down and there was no way to enter without the proper password.

When we moved to rural PA in 2007 it was less than a year after a gun man had killed Amish children at school only 38 miles from where we moved. To enter our little country elementary school, parents had to be buzzed in one at a time. Parents were not allowed to hold the door open for the parent behind them. Inside, they would have to present their license in the office. The license was scanned and checked by a security database before they could enter.

My children were too young then and oblivious to the reasons for these procedures. At that time, I kept the dark details to myself, but this time my children are completely aware. The news is all around them.

My eldest son was date/‘texting’ a girl with whom he had been in theatrical productions. She attends Chardon schools only 25 miles from where we live now. One of her friends was Daniel Parmertor, the boy who was first to die in this latest school shooting.

“How is she?” I asked.

“She texted she was not OK, and she didn’t want to talk about it,” he said.

“Give her some time,” I told him.

What reasons can I give to my children so that they can understand what just happened? Are they safe? When I look at what has happened around us I think perhaps not. We in our very normal suburban homes have been so close to these horrible disasters. I read the statistics and they say that violent crimes in schools in the USA are down, but here we are again, another person out of their mind with a gun. Guns are still too easy to access in the US and mental health care too difficult to access.

Our nation… our global community needs to spend more time meditating on how everything and everyone is interconnected and less time simply watching and mindlessly reacting to the horror of the moment. Compassionate thought should guide our every action, become our daily practice, and this will create our better future.

Please make it your mission to counter every act of random violence with a thoughtful act of kindness!

Peace in all your good endeavors.

I send my love and prayers for healing to the Chardon community and the many grieving families affected by this tremendous tragedy.

Under Siege in a Strange Land

In ordinary times, a trip to the gas station was not remarkable, but now, I looked carefully around me for parked cars with passengers, potential enemies, lying in wait. Was it my imagination, or were the streets quieter than usual? I couldn't put off getting gas any longer or I would run dry. No one was at the pumps, so I took advantage of the empty space and strategically pulled around to the back side of a pump so that the pump would be between me and a possible sniper. I only filled the tank half full and I retrieved my credit card quickly. I was successful, no shots fired. I speed off toward the daycare to retrieve my 4 year old.

They had just instituted a new system at our daycare. Parents would no longer park their cars and walk in to retrieve their children. Now, we waited in a line of cars. When our car reached the door a teacher would identify us and send our child out. Only one child would be allowed to leave. If someone was going to shoot children at school, as the Sniper had already done, it would be only one child at a time.

During the years that we lived in the DC there was an average of about 250 murders a year in that city. But this was something different.  Looking at a map of where the shootings happened, they were all around us, North, South, East and West of our home.  There seemed to be no pattern, no motive, just someone with a gun lying in wait at a gas station, a bus stop, a Home Depot, a school… For the first time in my life, I could imagine what a city under siege might be like.

When it was all over, my neighbor said that he had seen him. He had come face to face with John Allen Muhammad. After murdering, he showered at our YMCA, our Y, where we took our children!

People always ask me if I am afraid to travel by myself. The answer is no. For the most part I have always felt safer while traveling abroad than I do in the United States. There are certainly countries that I do not choose to travel to, but keep in mind that the average murder rate in the United States is 5.4 murders per 100,000 people, as compared to 1.84 murders per 100,000 people in Nepal where I travel most often. The United States is indeed a strange land having 90 guns for every 100 citizens. This makes the USA the most heavily armed society in the world. -Information gathered from Wikipedia.