The views expressed by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and its subsidiary the High School Democrats of America (HSDA) are not necessarily shared by the author - although this is an opinion piece published by a subsidiary of the HSDA, the opinions expressed are solely the authors, and can deviate from DNC and HSDA policies and positions. The “Progressive Teen” title does not imply the author holds progressive views.
Let’s talk about great dreams: in American history, there was the dream of independence from Great Britain, made concrete by the Declaration of Independence, the Revolutionary War, the Articles of Confederation, and eventually the United States Constitution. Martin Luther King Jr’s dream that his children “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” was made famous before a crowd of 250,000 at the Washington monument and made immortal through school curriculums across the country. John Lewis and the marchers who tried to cross the Edmund Pettus bridge on March 7, 1965 had a dream. Brutally beaten down by Alabama State Troopers in what was dubbed “Bloody Sunday,” they forged forwards, metaphorically and literally, in pursuit of what the Constitution coined as a “more perfect union.” Donald Trump had a dream he could one day become president - so did Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. History is filled with famous, and infamous, dreams.
Two nights ago I had a dream. It wasn’t extravagant, like rising to the presidency or starting a revolution. It was dark, bloody, and a little out of the ordinary. But, just like all those previously mentioned dreams from our nation’s history, it was a uniquely American one. It was a literal dream, not something I desired to do or become but a simple thing that happened in my head while I was asleep. It was one of those dreams you totally forget about in the morning but comes to you later, in pieces. When I woke up all I remembered was being in beautiful Millenium Park in downtown Chicago. Slowly, elements of the dream started coming back to me. Coagulated red streaks on the pavement and in the grass. People running across some bridge. Screams. This hadn’t been a dream - it was a nightmare.
On December 13th – genuinely less than two days later – people were living my nightmare, at Brown University in Rhode Island, running from a gunman’s bullets.
And it isn’t even surprising. It’s so normal that I didn’t think anything of my nightmare. It’s so normal that when a robotic voice rings throughout my school instructing students to “initiate ‘run, hide, fight protocol’” we talk over it.
On December 14, in Australia, a place where kids aren’t numb to drills where they practice hiding from crazy people with guns, another armed killer attacked a group of people at Bondi Beach in Sydney. In ten minutes, two gunmen mowed down 15 attendees of a Chanukah celebration, including one ten year old child and one holocaust survivor. The holocaust survivor was named Alex Kleytman, and he died shielding his wife from bullets.
This attack at Bondi Beach and the Brown University shooting are both undeniable tragedies.
According to ABC News, in Australia, there have been six notable mass shootings since 1996. According to GunViolenceArchive.org, in the United States of America, there have been twelve in the last week, 23 in the month of November, over 1,000 in the last two years, and roughly 5,505 mass shootings in the history of the Gun Violence Archive; which only goes back to when the archive was created in 2014.
Why this contrast between two developed, rich countries? It’s pretty simple: in the U.S, there aren’t comprehensive gun regulations. In April 1996, 35 people were killed by a lone gunman in the tourist town of Port Arthur, Australia. The country was terrified afterwards in a way similar to that of your liberal friend putting some quote about gun violence on their Instagram story after a school shooting – but as we’ve seen in the states, this isn’t something that causes any real change, and it wouldn’t have in Australia, either. Instead, someone identified a broken system in which gun regulation was the responsibility of Australian states and not the national government – really similar to how the U.S largely allows individual states to regulate firearms, with the exception of agencies like the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).
This system of allowing state regulation is the precise reason why a state like Illinois awarded “A” gun law status by the Giffords Law Center still has a disproportionately large amount of gun violence. As of data from a 2017 report, 60% of guns used in Chicago crimes came from other states, often with looser gun laws.
Australia dealt with this system with the 1996 National Firearms Act, which established a national system of firearm regulations. In the next decade, Australia fell victim to zero mass shootings. That sounds pretty effective.
The man who identified this problem of state regulation and worked to institute the National Firearms Act was Australian Prime Minister John Howard. He wasn’t a progressive politician, and he wasn’t a fascist trying to take your guns and subject the Australian people to his will – he was a center right conservative who decided something needed to be done and did it.
Current Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has already convened discussion over new gun regulations and announced a slew of new strategies to combat mass shootings less than a week after the Bondi Beach shooting. Imagine if after those two students were killed at Brown University, President Trump signed one of his magical and evidently highly effective executive orders instituting various strategies to end these slaughters.
Don’t get me wrong - guns are cool. I’ve shot plenty of guns before, from revolvers to rifles to double-barreled shotguns. That being said, they just aren’t cool when they’re being used to kill people, and people who still support anyone owning any gun for any reason also aren’t cool. This doesn’t have to be a choice between guns and saving kids like folks in Washington like to portray it, but if it has to be, I’m going to pick the lives of my friends and I over the “lives” of corporations like Smith & Wesson.
So next time you see a reel from your congressman demanding action from his colleagues or President Trump offering his thoughts and prayers, remember that those are just words, and words aren’t real. What’s real are bullets – bullets are real, and so is blood. All it takes is a signature or a vote to end the shooter drills and the dead students, and people in positions where they can take action who don’t support immediate action to end massacres of children by cloaking their selfishness in “freedom” or “liberty” aren’t living in the same world reasonable people are.
Kleytman, the murdered holocaust survivor, was described by his family as a lover of “freedom and democracy” - something tells me that while he was wrapped around his wife, feeling the delayed pain of bullets thudding into his flesh, he wasn’t proud of the freedom that allowed two terrorists to purchase the bullets and acquire the gun used to kill him and fourteen others. Words like “freedom” are empty until the people using “freedom” to justify owning guns inspired by weapons of war realize that “freedom” isn’t scanning the movie theater for exits during the trailers “just in case,” and it definitely isn't waking up in the morning with a vivid memory of the shooting that just played out in your dream. That isn’t “freedom.”
