Article: After The Recoil

    Each morning we started out the day in the same way. the little first grader would come to my room before we went to her classroom. On Friday, her mother brought her to school and met me in he hallway. I was dumbfounded. I knew the mother, the father, and the older brother. This was the sister of the little kindergartner that was shot by the gun. Now I knew why she didn't want to come to school. The mother and I walked with the daughter to my office, where we talked about how things were going. By the next week, the youngster was going into her classroom like all he other first graders.

    Four years on down the line, we were running a part-time youth shelter at our house. Teenagers who were in trouble with the law, but didn't need the attention that a jail would give them, were sent to our house. Marcella stayed home, while we had placements from the juvenile judge. We got a call about a boy who needed a place to stay while he readied himself for drug treatment. It was this older brother who we were asked to pick up at the sheriff's station.

    On the way to our house, the teenager opened up about his dad.

    "We don't get along. He has never gotten over the fact that I killed my brother. It was an accident, but he brings it up. Reliving it doesn't make me any more guilty. After the divorce, our family hasn't been the same, and I am blamed for the divorce as well." The youngster was going into some heavy drug treatment programming and could use all the support he could get.

While he was at our house, his mother came out several times and talked to him on the front porch, while we sat down with Sissy and watched "Babe The Pig" and several other shows. Older brother regretted the trouble he had caused and was trying desperately to change his life. It would have been a big help if his father could have been part of the treatment plan. But the father did not show up at our house to support his son, while his son was with us. Maybe he was at some point later on, but ", he wasn't supportive then. Sadly, gun deaths affect an entire family for years after the initial recoil of the weapon.

Every year, there are approximately 500 deaths of children attributed to guns in United States' homes. Most of these guns were purchased to use as protection from home invasions or break-ins. This does not include hunting accidents or accidents with rifles used for hunting purposes. Every gradeschooler should learn about gun safety. A universal handbook that would reward the user a certificate would do, but hand gun safety is important enough that it needs to be mandated for all elementary students before they get out of second grade. This gun accident happened in Anadarko, Oklahoma.

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