There are no words

I am not sure how to tell my kids anymore how to deal with school shootings - I just don't.  They have seen it happen in their under 12 year old lives multiple times, in multiple places and with one common theme - they are scary, sad and not going away in the current climate.

The debate on this does not focus on the victims, the parents of the victims or potential victims or how to realistically address this.  The easy fix appears to be usually to make gun laws that are on the books federal and enforce them, to reduce the number of weapons one individual can own, remove assault rifles for all civilian buyers.  Maybe you add in registration, courses, insurance kind of like you have with cars.  There is no real justification in my mind for the number of guns in the US, one for every resident of this country -- over 300 million.  There is also no real argument in the 2nd amendment which has not been upheld multiple times by the Supreme Court and then was upheld in recent times.  You want guns I am ok with muskets - to keep in line with the time the amendment was signed into law.  

That alone will not fix it - that will help a lot - but it will not fix it.  We have a mental health system that needs to be more available too, though I think this is a worldwide problem and no where is mental health really being addressed as much as it should be.  

We have a problem where the same people who fight tooth and nail against government telling them what to do with their firearms have no problem trying to use that same government to regulate women's choices for their bodies.  

Along the way it seems like the media wants us to believe we have lost our empathy - that the people who like to categorize us in to us v them are winning.  That we do not care about one another, or our children but instead are a bunch of judgmental fundamentalists who want nothing but to say no to anything that threatens to question the belief system they have. 

Somehow we are lost in these arguments and partially that is why we are still seeing these school shootings - because at the base of this whole problem is actually the real issue.  Term limits and campaign reform.  When our politicians are beholden to millions of dollars from any one entity because they need that much money to keep getting re-elected to the same office they no longer want to work to what is right for the people except for those people writing the checks.  So those writing the checks have two main interests the first being that they get their money's worth for their own personal gain.   The second is that they ensure that their belief system is the one that gets pushed through.   In order to do this they have to ensure we are distracted and divided.  

After all if we stopped to think about it no matter your color, your background, your socio-economic status, your relationship and who it is with status would not matter if we asked do you want our country to do better, do you want opportunities, do you want our children to learn of school shootings as a thing of the past that we solved, do we want great healthcare and a system that sustains innovation not imitates other systems with their own issues - do we want our children to be the next Greatest generation?  Well yes we do - we also as a majority worry more about these things and how we are going to balance the need for our government to do this without asking our government to be the biggest crutch we have.  We want them to be our physical therapy not our permanent cast.  

So I have no words to tell my sons that this will get fixed because we need to demand that we all have the thing we have so cherish - a democracy and for that we need campaign finance reform and term limits.  We have our votes and we have our ability to speak through them -- until we do the tragedies will be our future.