You know the adage; The Price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance. It occurs in other forms including Liberty instead of Freedom as well as in reversed forms such as Eternal Vigilance is the price … It has been attributed to various authors including Thomas Jefferson, but there is no published work from him or others that validates that attribution.
This particular view of what freedom and liberty require in order to endure, intersects with the Second Amendment and Americans’ general love affair with firearms. We gotta have guns in case we need to take our country back from an oppressive government – one that tries to wrest our freedoms and liberty from us. It makes a certain kind of emotional sense – an action in response to fearfulness, I suppose.
However, the reality is somewhat different. The price of Freedom these days appears to be the lives of our children and our own sense of safety – fragile and tenuous as it is. So that gun owners can feel free, we have to let our school kids be targets for those among gun owners who would choose to use them to make an emotional or political statement.
You may see this issue from a different perspective, and I would normally say that’s fine, but in this case it would only be fine if you were willing to let your children be the targets instead of mine.