Venture Community Services exists for just one reason; to help people.  Every facet of our organization is built for the sole purpose of helping others.  If something is wrong in the life of someone we support, the agency moves quickly to fix it.  I believe Venture, and agencies like it, have a responsibility to apply the same standard when things are wrong elsewhere. We need to use our platform to call attention to issues that affect large numbers of people in our society and such an issue is currently dominating the news cycle: another school shooting.

Let me ask an obvious question….why do we tolerate this?  Make no mistake about it, we do as a society tolerate this atrocity.  Since the massacre at Columbine High School in 1999, the U.S. has seen almost 400 school shooting incidents and approximately 500 deaths.  The United States has more such shootings than any other developed country in the world and yet we do nothing about it.  How is that possible?!  More importantly, how do we change it?My fear now is that not enough people see school shootings as the horrific event that they are.  We have a candidate for public office who referred to these shootings as a “fact of life”.  Really? That’s all ya got? Political commentator Bill O’Reilly famously (infamously?) said in 2017, after a shooting at a Las Vegas concert killed 60 people, that this is the “price of freedom”.  In addition to being the single most asinine thing I have ever heard, it is a sentiment that should make everyone sick to their stomachs.  One thing we absolutely cannot allow is for school shootings to become an issue that people are ever desensitized to in the 21^st century.  We need to insist that people roll up their sleeves and fully commit to addressing this topic.

Step number one to overcoming this horrible subject is to spend more time listening and less time talking.  It’s not a political issue, it is a human issue unique to America.  These shootings always lead to powerful people complaining about other powerful people, or sound bites, or incredibly offensive silence. We mustn’t be naïve about the difficulty of finding a solution to school shootings, not so long as people find the topic so polarizing.  How can the safety of our children even be a polarizing issue??  Somehow it is and those who have made it so need to shut up and get out of the way of those who are willing to work together to protect children in schools.  Someone needs to start finding common ground where people can stand and finally address this disaster, even people who usually disagree about most things.  And can we please stop saying we cannot tolerate this level of violence against children? It seems to me we have been tolerating it for too long already.

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