“He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

The “Tadpole” above is only 15 weeks old and he’s already being prepared for his first lockdown.

Nursery schools around the country are concerned that the children in their care might become victims of gun violence. That’s why they have Erin and Jason’s 15-week old son practicing for the day when a gun wielding terrorist enters his new life.

We should be outraged, but we aren’t. Instead, we just accept the inevitability of this kind of violence. That makes us as guilty as any perpetrator.

We should all do something about this. Now, I can’t speak for “We”, but I can speak for “Me”. I won’t let fear rule my life, I won’t let fear win.

I want to turn my sorrow and outrage to action.

Adam Gopnik, a staff writer at The New Yorker, presented a few simple truths coming from the recent Stoneman Douglas High School event.

Gopnik says that lockdown practices and eMail reminders to talk to our children about violence, aren’t solutions to our gun problems. They are only treating the symptom but not getting at the cause.

Let’s face it, this nation has a fetish for guns – brought on by a lobby strong enough to control an entire political party, and a good portion of another.

That’s the problem.

They want us to accept the death of hundreds of children as the price for our freedom. That makes them complicit in murder.

As Gopnik says, “When you refuse to act to stop a social catastrophe from happening, you are responsible for the consequences of the social catastrophe.”

A Day in a Very Young Life

The record will show how this tadpole was happy, drank all his milk and took two naps. We know that at this age, he won’t remember every event but might recall his caregivers and some aspects of his early environment.

Gun massacres aren’t mysterious and guns aren’t resistant to legislation.

Gopnick writes, “Building small barriers to gun violence reduces all gun violence. The lesson of contemporary social science is that small difficulties have great effects; make crime harder and you have much less crime.”

Why can’t gun ownership be at least as difficult as owning and operating a car?

The Second Amendment’s right to bear arms is not about slinging a weapon of war over your shoulder to go shopping in the local market.

Nor is this about mental health. Sure, “People who kill children en masse are crazy,” but every county has its share of unstable people. Only in America do we give them weapons.

Then, to make it worse, our current commander-in-chief reverses a rule designed to keep mass-killing weapons out of the hands of people with certain mental illnesses; and we slide back under the dark control of the NRA.

If we only shrug and say it will just happen again, and do nothing to stop it (even work to see no one else can stop it either), then we are complicit when it does.

Let’s skip the lockdown practice for this newborn and fix the laws so Erin and Jason can get some rest from this madness.

That’s my take, what’s yours?

Do we just schedule more lockdowns, hire more guards, and have “teacher work days” for target practice OR do we try what the rest of the world has already learned?

If you are, or have ever been, a member of the NRA, what is your opinion?

Do we need more discussion, or are we ready to vote? Not a vote by the special interest but a vote by the people.

As always the conversation starts here.

“In the ordinary choices of every day we begin to change the direction of our lives.” – Eknath Easwaran