When will we finally say, ‘Enough’?

I was a junior at Plainedge High School, in North Massapequa, in 2018, when 17 people died and 17 others were injured in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School massacre in Parkland, Florida.

After the shooting, we wore orange to school — the color for protesting gun violence — and staged a walkout in solidarity with the school. We ran a fundraiser through the National Honor Society, from Plainedge to Parkland, to help a grieving community over a thousand miles away. And yet, it didn’t seem like enough.

What words do you have to offer, thoughts you have to think, when something so senseless happens to people your age?

That year, everything changed. When we returned to classes in the fall of 2018, the front doors at Plainedge High had been changed to fortify the exterior. We weren’t permitted to enter or leave through any entrance except the main one, and we carried I.D. cards at all times.

But as demonstrated earlier this month at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, sometimes no level of security is enough. It wasn’t enough at the Covenant School in Nashville last spring; it wasn’t enough in Uvalde, Texas, the year before. The list of schools and communities tarnished by acts of violence against children goes on and on, and at some point, I think we all can’t help but wonder: How many more?

Many will argue that guns aren’t the problem in America, and that instead we have a mental health crisis. I agree — we do. But the two are not mutually exclusive.
Gun violence, and deaths related to it, have been on the rise. In 2020, gun violence claimed more lives than it had during any other year on record — more than 45,000. In 2022 it was the leading cause of death among U.S. children and teens between ages 1 and 19.

Guns are a problem. But so is mental health.

The “mental health crisis” has long been Republicans’ scapegoat — their explanation for school shootings — and yet the party has done almost nothing to address their supposed concerns.

According to the American Psychological Association, before the coronavirus pandemic, 1 in 5 children had a diagnosed mental health disorder. After 2020, surveys showed that 71 percent of parents said the pandemic had taken a toll on their child’s mental health — and things haven’t gotten much better since.

Despite the fact that the data supports what we already know, 193 House Republicans voted against the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which provided $2.35 billion to expand vital school mental health services; 210 voted against the American Rescue Plan Act, which provided $12 billion to address mental health needs arising from the pandemic; and 205 voted against the Mental Health Matters Act, which would provide grants for schools to hire more mental health experts and grow their mental health services.

America has a problem, and the longer we wait to address it, the more people will die. School shootings should have ended after Columbine, after Sandy Hook, after Oxford High School in Michigan. Students shouldn’t be afraid to go to school.

“Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” is written in our Declaration of Independence, codifying the unalienable rights of all Americans. But as it turns out, the children who have been senselessly murdered while their government stood by didn’t have those rights. Because if they did, they’d still be alive. Right?Colt Gray, the 14-year-old charged with four murders for the shooting in Georgia, shouldn’t have had access to a gun. He displayed serious mental health concerns and had made threats in the past, and yet he carried out an act of extreme violence, with a weapon his father purchased for him.

The problem isn’t isolated to Georgia. Two weeks ago, right here on Long Island, a Bayville man was arrested because his 11-year-old son wandered out of his house carrying his father’s shotgun.

We can no longer afford to sit on the sidelines and hope things will change. The time for thoughts and prayers has passed. What we need is decisive action — action that addresses both gun control and mental health, because either one without the other is no solution.

The safety of children, the preservation of their future, depends on our ability to enact meaningful reforms. The question is no longer how many more tragedies we can endure, but when we will finally say, “Enough.”

Jordan Vallone is a senior editor of the Herald Community Newspapers. Comments? jvallone@liherald.com.