Nicole Russell: This conservative is rethinking gun culture after Uvalde

I’m a conservative mother of four who goes to a gun range semi-regularly to practice. But after the Uvalde tragedy, I’ve wrestled with what it means to keep our children safe. I’m not the only one. A new back to school ad released Tuesday by the political group Mothers Against Greg Abbott pits juxtaposes a child’s innocence and gun violence. In the ad, an upbeat country song plays while a mom dresses her young boy for school. When the song ends and the camera pans out, the boy is wearing body armor and a helmet. “Our kids aren’t soldiers,” the ad reads. “Vote for change November 8.” The ad sounds happy but looks macabre. The irony exaggerates, but it’s jarring and makes a salient point: In Uvalde, 19 kids similar to the boy in the ad were obliterated so badly the coroner has purposely refused to describe what he saw when identifying their bodies. Our kids are indeed not soldiers and apparently, the law enforcement who arrived in Uvalde to help that day and failed to act aren’t, either.

The coroner need not go into graphic detail. Over four years ago, a similarly deranged shooter entered another school, Marjorie Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, Florida, and killed 17 adults and high school students. The killer has already been found guilty but his sentencing trial has been ongoing for weeks now, and broadcast to the public. The trial has shown grisly evidence of what an AR-15 does to a human body. It’s almost unimaginable save for the fact that multiple medical examiners have taken to the stand to describe it. Students who survived have been called to testify and show graphic photos and videos from their cell phones to the jury. Members of the generation that grew up online, whose instinct was to film the tragedy as it unfolded, had to live through more guilt and trauma as they played for the jury the sounds of friends moaning as they died. Between the chilling audio, emotional testimony of parents — the mother of one victim, Luke Hoyer, still hasn’t moved his cell phone charger from the outlet in his room the day he was killed — and the technical verbiage of the medical examiner’s analysis, the Parkland sentencing trial is Exhibit A of the terrible evils a human can inflict upon others. There are all kinds of evil in the world, but that perpetrated on children, innocent human beings, seems the most gut-wrenching. For a parent, losing a child, especially to a heinous tragedy, represents the unthinkable. Most parents would rather die than outlive their children. Keeping them safe is centermost in the mind, and in times like these, nauseatingly so.