This viewpoint column was submitted by Melissa Siig, a mother of 3 and a Tahoe Metropolis resident.
Dear university student,
I know you as soon as experienced dreams of learning overseas in the United States, of staying immersed in the tradition you have occur to admire from our flicks and Tv set exhibits that we export abroad. You thought you would appear to America to learn English, to reside around the sunny beach locations of California or the bustling cities of New York or Chicago. You believed you would occur here to working experience the newness and openness of America, to live in the place of Hollywood and Silicon Valley, of Wall Street and Disneyland, of Harvard and UCLA, of soccer online games and prom queens and kings.
Unfortunately, I am below to explain to you a single matter: Do not come. It is not safe and sound in this article. We simply cannot defend you. Our faculties have been sacrificed to the altar of guns.
I was a foreign trade college student when I was 16. I used 6 months living with a host loved ones and likely to significant university on the west coastline of France. I am now 50 years aged and to this working day I however price the remarkable working experience I experienced living and finding out abroad. I arrived back again to the states fluent in French and with a bigger comprehending of another nation, Europe and how the planet sights my have country.
Nowadays, I would inform all future overseas exchange pupils and their dad and mom – do not decide The united states. Our colleges are not secure. Gun violence is now the foremost cause of death for small children and teens in the U.S., surpassing vehicle incidents and drug overdoses. We have experienced 27 university shootings this year alone, and the calendar year is only half around.
If you want to master English, decide on Canada or Australia or the Uk. After dealing with mass shootings, these international locations took decisive action like banning assault weapons, requiring history checks and a waiting around interval to purchase guns, and instituting a gun amnesty plan. These nations have seen number of to no mass shootings given that. The U.S., on the other hand, has had extra mass shootings than any other region in the world given that 2009, there have been 274 mass shootings in The us.
So convey to me, expensive student, do you definitely want to come to the U.S. to review? Do you really want to go to school in a nation that values its guns extra than its small children? Do you want to reside in a place where just after a mass shooting that killed 19 harmless school little ones and two lecturers the NRA still thought it was a excellent strategy to keep its annual convention just 300 miles from where the massacre took place?
I, for just one, do not. And nevertheless I truly feel helpless to modify our gun legal guidelines, I sense helpless to struggle against a gun lobby that has these types of a limited grip on this state that not even the loss of life of kids, in excess of and more than and more than yet again, does something to transfer the needle on practical gun control laws. Pricey student — do you know that The united states has a legislation that shields gun brands from lawsuits? We, as citizens who desperately want to safeguard our have youngsters and beloved ones, now do not have the appropriate to sue firearm providers from their fatal contribution to mass shootings.
Pricey overseas trade student — do not come to America. Our universities are not harmless. Our grocery retailers and bars and live performance halls are not protected. We can’t protect you. We have decided on alternatively to safeguard the proper to bear arms about all else, even over the most harmless and precious amongst us, our kids.
Melissa Siig is the mother of three kids — two in large school and one in center college — and lives in Tahoe City, California. She has been a journalist and editor for 20 many years.
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