The news of the Las Vegas shooting made its way to New Zealand at about 8 p.m. our time.
As Shane and I got the kids ready for bed, we took turns quietly checking the Twitter feeds, CNN.com and a handful of news sites to try to figure out what was happening and how bad it would be. (That's what we've trained ourselves to do in these situations, right?)
We were scared, angry, sad -- and completely helpless being half a world away.
But we were also safe.
I'll pause this story for a moment to say that this post has been wanting to be written for awhile now. But I always stopped myself from discussing this issue -- I'm talking about guns, gun violence, gun safety -- on a platform that's supposed to be about sharing and celebrating our move abroad.
But, in reality, those two things are deeply entwined.
Not many of you know this, but my primary reason for wanting to move out of Washington, D.C. was safety. After a string of incidents in the US and abroad, I no longer felt safe in our urban home. Every shopping mall, ballpark, grocery store, office space we entered -- even the kids' schools --would put me on high alert. I scanned for the exit and planned in my head how I could grab the kids and run for the door would the worst occur.
And if that sounds dramatic to you, remember that the shooting of Congressman Steve Scalise happened just miles from our home. The Home Depot we went to nearly every weekend was the site of one of the terrible DC Sniper killings. The District routinely has multiple shooting incidents and homicides over the course of a weekend, and Fairfax County, the suburban area where we lived, has seen an increase in homicides in the last few years.
Just last week, a gunman entered the building shared by my son's Northern Virginia daycare, a school both of my kids attended, a second home for our family.
For too many minutes, the parents of those kids -- our friends -- did not know if their children were safe or in grave danger. The gunman ended up shooting and killing himself on the fourth floor of the building, no where near the kids who were likely playing outside when the incident started.
But the fear it created was tragedy enough: The scrambling of desperate parents out of work and to the school. The evacuation of children by bus to a safer location.
Sitting here now, I can feel that fear coursing through me. And I just keep thinking: That would have been us. I would have been one of those parents I saw on the TV news clips, white with fear, relieved but angry that my kids had to be subjected to such an awful event. Wondering how we could ever go back to our normal routine after such a chilling disruption.
That would have been us...had we not moved abroad.
If there were any doubts we made the right choice for our family, that incident cleared them all up. I feel safe from gun violence, especially the terrible shootings that have become far too commonplace in the US, here.
Since 1772 -- more than 200 years! -- there have been 19 recorded "massacres" in New Zealand, and several of those were military events that happened around the time of the country's founding. Since 2017 -- that's only 10 months -- there have been 270 "mass shootings" in the US. 270 incidents in which three or more people were killed by guns. Can you believe that?
And it's not a population discrepancy. The murder rate per million people is 8.85 in New Zealand and 42.01 in the U.S. -- that's 5 times higher. When comparing murders with firearms, the numbers are 2.53 per million in NZ and 32.57 in the U.S. -- that's 13 times higher.
Some native New Zealanders look at those numbers and still think the country has a gun problem. There are an estimated 1.1 million firearms here, after all. But compare that to the U.S., where more than 300 million guns can be found -- and yet we blame all violence on the bad eggs who just happen to get their hands on a weapon.
I can't begin to explain why the US is such an anomaly when it comes to gun ownership and gun rights and why we seem OK with mass murder. We're destroying people's lives and striking unnecessary fear in our entire population, down to the youngest among us. We're destroying any semblance of civil society we have left. I don't understand it.
But if I had to guess why New Zealand is different, why it's been able to achieve a society that's far more peaceful and safe than what we currently have going on in the US, it would be this simple line from the country's Wikipedia entry: "Gun laws usually gain the support of both major parties before they are passed."
That's it in a nutshell. Guns are not an "issue," a "right," a "controversy," something we need to argue about and hate each other over. Guns are dangerous, period, for both good and bad eggs.
It's not controversial to want your society to be free from the fear of gun violence. Peace and safety are not political issues.They're something we all deserve.
I feel very lucky to have found that for my family. And I hope that someday the US can figure it out for itself.
