WHEN GUNS & SCHOOLS COLLIDE

“We’re not allowed to talk about what happened yesterday,” she says, “but I want you all to know that I hope you’re okay.”

What happened yesterday? I sit with my back against the classroom wall, trying to decipher the teacher’s vague words of condolence.

“I saw them,” one student calls out. “It was a drive-by.”

A shooting?

The teacher ignores the comment and begins the lesson.

After class, standing close to the metal detectors and armed school guards, I ask the teacher why the school has a policy of silence around shooting incidents. “If it’s gang related—” she starts to explain. Her voice trails off, distracted by students fighting in the hallway.

On the train-ride home, for the first time since I arrived in the U.S., I feel unsafe.

I moved to Chicago in September 2004. In the daylight, the skyscrapers reflect in the cold water of Lake Michigan. At night, the gay bars and cafes of the Boystown neighborhood are packed. In the winter, when the sun disappears by late afternoon and everyone walks with their hands in the pockets of their heavy coats, the cityscape is still beautiful and the bars are still busy, but the dark alleyways and side streets no longer feel like convenient shortcuts. I keep to the main roads, even though it means a few more minutes out in the sub-zero temperatures.

I return to the school, located twenty minutes from my new home, to conduct research on its after-school programs; programs designed in part to keep the teenagers off the streets and in part to help them learn marketable skills.

I jump when the school’s Vice-Principle bursts into the classroom and screams at two students to “Get the fuck out, you worthless pieces of shit,” because, “You don’t deserve the privilege of this program. You’re headed for prison.”

As the boys grab their coats and leave, they don’t say a word—clearly accustomed to being spoken to in this way—and I also say nothing, because I expect one of the teachers to speak up. But nobody does.

An hour or so later, I overhear a group of students discussing the recent shooting. When they realize I’m listening, they change the subject. In this school, to talk about gang violence is not allowed. To express how they feel about “what happened” is forbidden, even if the victims or shooters were their friends. They can’t voice aloud what they wish would be done about gun violence and gang culture in their neighborhoods. They can’t discuss what they are afraid of, or what they saw with their own eyes. And they can’t even begin to discuss possible solutions.

When I ask about the students and teachers in uniforms, I realize that the school is attached to a military academy where young teens are recruited and prepared for the U.S. army. And yet talking about guns and gangs is off limits.

I’m astounded when a teacher explains to me that talking about guns and gangs can lead to a formal detention—a full-day detention, where students must sit in silence from morning until mid-afternoon, staring forward, fed only jelly sandwiches, forbidden from going outside, forbidden from reading, forbidden from writing, forbidden from learning, forbidden from being listened to.

After nine years of living in Chicago, car alarms and buses breaking at traffic lights and the squeaking metal of the trains on their tracks and the smells of fuel mixed with waste in the underground stations all still remind me of London. But I now look left when crossing the street and I pronounce water with a softened 't' and I say elevator and candy and sidewalk, and I’ve learned to use most American spelling and punctuation.

But I still hold onto some British-isms. I teach my daughter English nursery rhymes. And I still pronounce it aluminium and I still ask for the loo and I still apologize if someone on a crowded train steps on my foot. And I still think of school as a safe place. A place where teenagers are encouraged to debate and challenge and think and talk, where they're spoken to with at least a little respect.

Facebook bleeds with the news of another mass-shooting. A man—who heard voices in his head and had a known history of “minor” shooting incidents—walked into a store and purchased a shotgun. Legally. Days later, he arrived at work—a secure Navy base near the nation’s capital—and he shot a dozen people dead before he too was killed.

When the President stands at his podium to reflect on this “unimaginable” violence—even though such incidents happen all the time and are, in fact, entirely imaginable—; when politicians call the victims of these shootings “heroes" and “patriots”—as if they chose to die in the name of their country—; and when journalists compare this latest mass-shooting to the recent elementary school shooting and a movie-theatre shooting and the daily drive-by shootings in Chicago, I find myself deeply frightened, mostly for my young daughter and her friends.

“We’re not allowed to talk about what happened yesterday.” We’re not allowed to challenge the so-called rights of Americans to hoard guns, military grade guns included. We’re not allowed to imagine a real change in gun control policy where people are required to undergo meaningful common-sense background checks before purchasing firearms, where all states are permitted to implement gun buy-back programs, where talking openly about gun and gang culture is part of every school’s curriculum.

Here’s an idea:

If we can’t yet change gun control policies, then let’s at least allow, support, and train teachers to raise questions about American gun culture in their classrooms. Let’s at least encourage students to think deeply and talk honestly and openly about what they see on the news and what they witness on their journeys home from school. Let’s at least give students time and space to reflect on the sounds of gunshots that they hear in their neighborhoods at nighttime—and in broad daylight. Rather than armed guards, let’s employ more school counselors.

In the struggle against gun violence, every person across the United States is already in possession of a powerful, sacred, American weapon: the freedom of expression.

I have a feeling that solutions to gun violence won’t come from Congress, or from lectures behind podiums, or from suited politicians in closed rooms with gun lobbyists taking aim at their political careers.

I have a feeling that, given the opportunity, it will be a classroom of high school students in Chicago or Aurora or Newtown that comes up with some tangible ways of reducing gun violence and gun deaths across the United States. I’m close to giving up on our adults and so-called leaders. On the issue of gun violence, it’s time to let our youth speak.