This feeling column was submitted by Melissa Siig, a mother of a few and a Tahoe City resident.
Dear scholar,
I know you once experienced goals of researching overseas in the United States, of currently being immersed in the culture you have arrive to admire from our videos and Television reveals that we export abroad. You considered you would appear to The united states to understand English, to stay in the vicinity of the sunny shorelines of California or the bustling cities of New York or Chicago. You considered you would arrive in this article to working experience the newness and openness of America, to dwell in the country of Hollywood and Silicon Valley, of Wall Avenue and Disneyland, of Harvard and UCLA, of football online games and prom queens and kings.
Regrettably, I am in this article to inform you one particular point: Do not arrive. It is not safe and sound below. We can not guard you. Our educational institutions have been sacrificed to the altar of guns.
I was a international exchange student when I was 16. I used 6 months living with a host loved ones and going to large faculty on the west coast of France. I am now 50 years old and to this day I nevertheless benefit the incredible working experience I had dwelling and researching abroad. I arrived back again to the states fluent in French and with a larger comprehending of yet another place, Europe and how the environment views my individual nation.
Currently, I would notify all prospective international exchange college students and their mothers and fathers – do not pick The us. Our universities are not risk-free. Gun violence is now the foremost induce of dying for children and young adults in the U.S., surpassing automobile incidents and drug overdoses. We have experienced 27 college shootings this year alone, and the calendar year is only fifty percent over.
If you want to learn English, select Canada or Australia or the British isles. Right after enduring mass shootings, these international locations took decisive action like banning assault weapons, requiring history checks and a waiting around period to acquire guns, and instituting a gun amnesty software. These nations have viewed handful of to no mass shootings considering that. The U.S., on the other hand, has had much more mass shootings than any other place in the world because 2009, there have been 274 mass shootings in The united states.
So tell me, pricey pupil, do you really want to occur to the U.S. to research? Do you truly want to go to college in a nation that values its guns additional than its little ones? Do you want to live in a region exactly where soon after a mass shooting that killed 19 harmless faculty children and two academics the NRA nonetheless imagined it was a excellent thought to keep its yearly convention just 300 miles from exactly where the massacre took put?
I, for a person, do not. And yet I truly feel helpless to adjust our gun laws, I come to feel helpless to combat towards a gun foyer that has this sort of a limited grip on this country that not even the death of youngsters, around and more than and over yet again, does anything to move the needle on smart gun command legislation. Expensive scholar — do you know that The us has a legislation that shields gun brands from lawsuits? We, as citizens who desperately want to safeguard our have kids and cherished types, at this time do not have the ideal to sue firearm providers from their fatal contribution to mass shootings.
Dear international exchange pupil — do not appear to The usa. Our faculties are not secure. Our grocery stores and bars and live performance halls are not safe. We simply cannot guard you. We have preferred instead to defend the suitable to bear arms more than all else, even above the most innocent and treasured amongst us, our young children.
Melissa Siig is the mother of a few kids — two in higher college and one in middle college — and life in Tahoe City, California. She has been a journalist and editor for 20 a long time.
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