Gun Violence and Our Schools
Gun Violence and Our Schools
A Current Event Response of National Council for the Social Studies
May 26, 2022
Violence in any form has no place in our country. Yet, violence at a school is unconscionable. Children go to school ready to learn—sometimes to find safety and security from a turbulent world around them. Teachers go to school ready to teach and inspire the hearts and minds of our children with whom we share our communities, and to inspire a new generation of thinkers, leaders, and citizens.
In 2019, National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) issued its first response to mass shootings. Since then, gun violence has continued in our schools, which directly affects the public’s wide and vast responsibility to provide a safe, clean, and supportive place called school. While our country has not settled on gun control legislation, NCSS is deeply concerned that in our current atmosphere nationwide, many educators will be silenced (or encouraged to be silenced) by new, punitive laws that may make it challenging or downright impossible to teach historical and contemporary issues that some would label as controversial. Gun violence in schools might be seen by some as one of these controversial issues. We do not see it as such.
We must have zero tolerance for gun violence anywhere and it must be addressed immediately. Our country’s history of defending individual freedoms to own and carry weapons is up for discussion here. Our children and our teachers have a fundamental responsibility to address issues like gun violence in schools directly, and age-appropriately, because these issues affect them personally. Our education system needs the freedom to teach that concepts such as liberty, personal freedom, and the right to bear arms come with responsibilities to protect (not harm) others; that society must not tolerate gun (or any kind of) violence toward others, particularly in public settings like schools, which prepare our children for the future; and, that some interpretations of our nation’s historical spirit of individualism and personal protection have come at great cost to individuals and entire communities who have been marginalized, forcibly displaced, and killed though gun violence.
Now, we are a nation embattled in heated debate about protecting life before birth, yet we continually fail to protect the lives of our children and teachers in schools. We grieve so deeply for the lost dreams and the lost promise of 19 children and 2 teachers in Uvalde, Texas, just as we have grieved before (and recently) over immeasurable lost lives in schools in Broward County, Florida; Newtown, Connecticut; Littleton, Colorado; and other schools too numerous to mention. Now, however, our grief turns to anger at missed opportunities to stop mass shootings from happening again. Our grief turns to anger when educators are silenced from listening to and discussing current issues with their students, such as the recent shootings, because short-sighted and politically-driven policies make it all but impossible to have those discussions.
Now is not the time to silence our students’ voices. Now is not the time to silence the voices of our educators. Now is the time to allow students and teachers to come together in solidarity to discuss those difficult issues that trouble our country. Discussion and consensus building are integral parts of a democracy.
This is social studies in action.