When a child is afraid for his safety to walk into school, there is a problem. When a teenager sits at their desk pondering the idea of if it is at all possible for a terrible act of violence to strike their high school, there is a problem. When the common teacher becomes a front-line soldier by the risk of their life being taken from them in a senseless act of violence at any given time, there is a problem.

Today, we face a problem as we have never faced it before: we’re “vulnerable”. How do we protect the students? With stories of shootings in schools all across America nearly becoming a common occurrence, we, as citizens of the United States, are faced with the burden of deciding what exactly we should do to respond to violence in schools.

Senator Dan Brown, a beloved member of the Rolla community, is a believer in the common idea that increasing the amount of weapons in the hands of “good guys” will drastically increase security. Senator Brown proposed a bill in the Missouri State Senate on Dec. 13, one day before the mass shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary, which would mandate that all first graders be taught a gun safety course in school. The bill would also require teachers to take eight hours of training for response to armed intruder.

I’m not going to regurgitate the same argument that every internet genius manages to come up with (listing of statistics and making snide, condescending remarks to anyone who disagrees). However, it seems to me that perhaps increasing the amount of weapons in the hands of “good guys” (who are the “good guys” anyway?) is not quite the way to go about approaching this.

Starting from the time that children are knee tall, they are exposed to the gun culture of America, the culture that suggests that it is a god given right to be able to own a firearm, when simple things such as healthcare and education are not a god given right. This culture raises our children to see weapons not as what they are (weapons), but rather as a staple in their life. As much as I see this as wrong, it would be an infringement on American citizens’ rights to say that they do not have the right to bear arms — sorta.

The Second Amendment, adapted to the United States Constitution in 1791, was written at a time when there was no such thing as assault rifles or fully automatic weapons. In the 1790 United States Census, the first census in U.S. history, the population was enumerated to be 3,929,214, which is roughly 91.5 times smaller than today’s population. The citizens of the United States had to provide for their family by hunting. They couldn’t just go to the store and buy a pound of meat. Perhaps allowing the right to own assault rifles is not necessarily a right after all.

On top of that, perhaps with the combination of less availability of assault weapons and more education into how dangerous firearms really are, we can raise a generation of children who don’t feel the need to be packin’ heat, especially in inner cities.

When I’ve talked to friends living in Europe, they didn’t really process the idea of having to shoot someone. It’s because it is not normal to be willing shoot someone, regardless of if it is self-defense or not. The interesting thing is, is that I couldn’t see most of the people, who are so willing to shoot an intruder, willing to kill someone with their bare hands.

It’s not as much of a matter of availability to firearms, but rather the culture that surrounds guns in the United States. In order to protect students in our schools, maybe we could use schools to teach the dangers of firearms. No, I’m not talking about a gun safety class, I’m talking about showing that if you have to use a firearm to kill someone, it’s not going to just be “Oh, well! I was just defending myself!” Education, my fellow students, is desperately needed in this time of “vulnerability”.