BACK TO SCHOOL, BACK TO ACTIVE SHOOTER DRILLS

The most graphic PSA (public service announcement) video I’ve seen in a long time is the recent ‘back to school’ ad from the Sandy Hook Promise organization.

The ad plays like your typical retail back-to-school promotion, with young students showing off their new school supplies, but then turns into a realistic school shooting situation. It contrasts the lighthearted tone of a TV commercial with the reality of gun violence in schools, and it’s really scary how it’s portrayed. The most important thing to take away from viewing the spot is that it’s accurate – yeah, it’s fictional, but this is how most kids going to school imagine it to be.

People, especially politicians, are quick to forget that the Sandy Hook shooting (20 grade school pupils and six staff members in Connecticut were killed in December 2012) was a little less than a decade ago. Despite that, we must hear the annual talk regarding gun safety, and conduct our own school lockdown drills. (Mt. Hood’s next drill is due on Oct. 24).

While we do that, we also have to sidestep the real conversation we’ve been trying to have about every month, it seems. If bringing up gun control right after an event such as Sandy Hook is considered “politicizing a tragedy,” then it isn’t too late to bring it back up in light of this PSA? We avoid meaningful legislation because there aren’t enough ads like this – you have to shock our citizens and politicians to bring that suffering back to reality.

Another thing we miss out on during periods of mass shooting crises and politics in America is that these problems are pretty uniquely American. The gun control debate among those on the left side of politics includes pointing to aggressive gun laws in other countries, notably Australia’s buyback program and the recent New Zealand massacre that led to New Zealand’s recent gun control steps.

What’s pretty notable and surprising in the eyes of Americans is how soon the government was able to act. The Christchurch shooting, for example, led to stricter gun laws in New Zealand and a buyback program – about a month after the shooting.

We’re nearly seven years after the Sandy Hook shooting, a massacre that didn’t take the most lives in these type of shootings, but took the youngest – first-graders and kindergartners. This PSA showed that there was a reason President Obama shed tears during his press conference regarding the shooting, a conference the President’s opposition criticized. Here we are in 2019: People who cried several years ago are letting out a few tears in an awareness ad, reminding us of a problem we let slip through the cracks.

It’s uniquely American for us to talk about this PSA, share it on social media, bring it to the attention of our representatives and then have it brushed off to the side. I think that is the long-term tragedy of the Sandy Hook massacre we need awareness of.