Letter to the editor submitted on March 26, 2018 by Barbara Petersen Parker
To the Editor,
On April 11, 2013, four months after the Sandy Hook massacre (12/14/12), my daughter and her classmates experienced a red code alert at Greenwich High School.
She, her classmates, and teachers immediately huddled in their classrooms with desks barricaded in front of their locked classroom doors.
Can you imagine having to do this? It was rumored a gunman was on the campus. A SWAT team arrived. I was able to get to GHS to see what was going on. No one knew what was happening. My daughter texted me updates. Fortunately, there was no gunman that day at Greenwich High School and the red code alert was a false alarm.
Many thanks to the Greenwich Police, the GHS headmaster, and the GHS administrative team for responding quickly to what could have been potentially another school massacre.
Although no one was killed or injured from the GHS red code alert that day, everyone experienced psychological trauma and fallout. Sadly, my 22 year old daughter and her classmates have become the gun violence generation. It has been 19 years since the Columbine High School massacre (4/20/99).
Statistically, 100 people die every day in the US due to gun violence… Nine of the 100 people killed daily are children.
Since 2013 there have been 300 school shootings in America. There are 35,000 gun deaths every year. The NRA has 5 million members. The US population is 326.1 million. The 1791 Second Amendment needs to be reconsidered.
It is time to end the unnecessary gun deaths in our country. We must all do whatever it takes to end nationwide gun violence. We need to disband the gun lobby, eliminate civilian ownership of assault weapons, demand universal background checks, insist on longer gun purchase waiting periods, disallow people with mental health issues to have access to guns, increase the age to twenty one for the purchase of guns, ask about the presence of guns in homes and public spaces, eliminate illegal gun trafficking and online gun sales.
Please support our country’s legislators and any of the organizations fighting gun violence. A few of these organizations are: March For Our Lives, SandyHook Promise, Moms Demand Action, Everytown, Giffords PAC, etc.
Throw them out. Never again. Enough is enough.
Thank you.
Barbara Petersen Parker
Former District 6 RTM member