The Right To Childhood Innocence

In my daily work as a therapist I bare witness to the pain, suffering in the life stories of the courageous people who are in my office. I am truly honored to hear these stories that are being entrusted to me.

After years of working in this field I have heard a multitude of different traumatic events and have come to know this as a gift of my work. Many days of the week I am touched deeply in this process and step back with gratitude for the life story I alone bare.

This week on the evening news I learned of a tragic incident in Arizona involving a nine year old girl and an automatic machine gun. For her family, a fun family outing involved going to a shooting range and firing weapons into the desert that a “family oriented” range offers. The man who was assisting her was shot and killed. It was an accident.

This story on the news hit me hard. I know all too well from my work that this event has altered the course of this girls life forever. She lost her innocence the moment her family walked into that place.

When I was nine I was deeply involved in playing with Barbie, spent time in the sand box, enjoyed going to amusement parks with my family, made snowman, loved to ice skate. I am most grateful for the childhood innocence and this joy I have been given. The memories are sweet to recall.

My parents made all kinds of mistakes in their job as parents. All parents do. Some mistakes of judgment our parents make have more dramatic impacts on us than others.

The parental mistaken judgment for this girl in Arizona is one that is reflective of our cultures infatuation with guns. We need to protect our children’s right to experience childhood innocence. Her parents and this business establishment did not.

People use guns for acts that by design are violent or aggressive. Guns are made to hurt and kill people and animals and these are acts of aggression or violence. There are times when guns are required to be a part of someone’s life experience and when aggression and violent acts are required to sustain life itself.

Guns are not toys. To pretend by “playing” with a gun creates a false understanding of the power and respect that one needs to have of such a weapon.

According to The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence:
-Everyday on average 45 people are shot or killed in an accident with a gun
-One in three people in the US know someone who has been shot
-In 2007, more pre-school-aged children (85) were killed by guns than police officers were killed in the line of duty
-More than one in five U.S. teenagers (ages 14 to 17) report having witnessed a shooting
-The lifetime medical cost for all gun violence victims in the United States is estimated at $2.3 billion, with almost half the costs borne by taxpayers

These are only a few of the staggering impacts that gun violence has on our culture. That little girl in Arizona will never be the same. We can add her trauma and a life time of guilt, nightmares, anxiety she and her parents will endure to those statistics.

This senseless violent act could be prevented in the future if we as a culture stop insisting that the second amendment is still a right we must carry into our daily lives and realize that the right to life itself is above all most important. I believe that was the true reason for our founding fathers placement of the second amendment into our Nations constitution. We were fighting for a new life itself at that time of our history.

At this time however in our Nation’s history, we can make a choice to turn our attention to a fight for the right to not bare witness to death and violence in our own backyards, give our children back the childhood innocence they need and deserve, and live life in peace. Will you join with me?

What can you do in your daily life to speak out about your right to live your life in peace and protect your children’s right to a childhood of innocence?