The news that two students and two teachers were killed, and nine people were wounded, in a Wednesday shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, should draw forth our full fury.
“What should have been a joyous back-to-school season in Winder, Georgia, has now turned into another horrific reminder of how gun violence continues to tear our communities apart,” President Joe Biden said in a press release that day. “Students across the country are learning how to duck and cover instead of how to read and write. We cannot continue to accept this as normal.”
There’s a logic to the priorities of banning books over controlling guns: Conservative ideology seeks to conserve the societal status quo in order to maintain society’s sexist and racist power structures.
But it is normal, in America. It has been normal. And the system has been intentionally designed to keep this — the lack of gun regulation, egregiously, in the name of “freedom” — the norm. Congress has been largely unwilling and, arguably, even resistant to pass gun control legislation since the 1994 Federal Assault Weapons Ban, which President George W. Bush allowed to expire in 2004. The first major piece of gun control legislation since this ban was the 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which implemented background checks for gun purchases under the age of 21 and outlawed the trafficking of illegal firearms.
Even more egregious is the fact that books have been deemed dangerous and must be banned while guns have been protected fiercely. And therein lies the tragic reality of present-day America.
Rather than ban guns as a nationwide public safety effort, this political negligence (thanks in large part to a powerful gun lobby) has forced school administrators and teachers to emend school curricula and the environment around the credible threat of gun violence, with traumatizing active shooter drills and the instillation of carceral apparati like metal detectors and fences and locked doors.
Still, such limitations are not enough to create a safe educational environment or one that is conducive to learning, a vulnerable experience that requires the freedom of known security. Children like the 14-year-old Apalachee shooter can still get their hands on a gun, or five, especially when guns saturate our culture. The nonprofit The Trace estimates that there are more than 378 million guns in circulation in the United States, not accounting for 3D-printed or DIY guns. That’s more guns than people. More weapons designed to kill than people to be killed.








