Dear Sen. Romney,
Let me tell you about my daughter. She has my husband’s brown eyes and my freckles. She’s missing a tooth — not from losing it but because it never grew in. (We’ll have some interesting dental bills someday.) Her favorite home cooked dinner is an unremarkable tomato soup that I always make too watery. Her favorite restaurant is Crown Burger. She loves fry sauce and camping and she is a big fan of Taylor Swift and of the Queen of the Night aria from “The Magic Flute.”
Every day when I drop her off at school I wonder if she will be murdered in a mass shooting.
Some days I can talk myself down. The odds are good that she’ll have a normal day. She even has slightly better odds because she’s in half-day kindergarten, and a shooter might come in the afternoon, after she’s already home. And most school shootings happen at high schools, anyway, although next year I will think every day of the first graders riddled with bullet holes in Newtown.
Other days — for example, days when there have been two mass shootings in the past week — it’s harder to take comfort in my daughter’s slightly better odds. I think about homeschooling her, or buying her a bullet-proof backpack, or moving out of the country.
All of my solutions, though, center on her. She has good odds — some other kids will be murdered instead. We could homeschool — let the public school kids take the bullets, literally. We could buy her a bullet-proof backpack because she’s ours, we could move out of the country and let America’s other children be sacrificed on the altar of unlimited gun rights.
With every mass shooting (Every! Mass! Shooting!) I feel like the families in Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” sorry but relieved that someone else drew the black spot this time. But other countries have given up the lottery completely.
Sen. Romney, I believe you are willing to reach across the aisle for logical legislation. Please, please work towards gun reform.
Rachel Miller, Salt Lake City