I am too young to drink, too young to enlist, too young to vote. I am not, apparently, too young to die at your hands.
I see it on the hastily typed papers taped to the school’s locked doors that beg students not to prop them open. I hear it in the hushed reverence in the halls, broken by the gunfire in videos recorded and shared. I know it when my little sister sees a neighbor with a holstered gun in an open-carry state and runs as fast as she can in the opposite direction.
The same arguments and refutations are recycled, ignored and recycled again to no end. Oh, we need comprehensive gun control? OK. Wait, it’s a snowballing mental-health crisis? Fine. Act more adult than the children who were murdered on your watch and do something. Anything, for that matter.
Until then, you — yes, even “you” who have wasted the voice I lack on your passive thoughts and submissive prayers — have failed us.
Mia Rhineer, Salt Lake City