Guns & Schools

When I had my job at a local university, I was responsible for managing the finances of our student organizations. At the time there were over 300 student orgs, of which roughly half were active. Each organization had to submit a budget that was considered for approval by the student council, and once they got their final numbers they could spend on their events. The majority of expenses were for food and t-shirts which they used a university credit card to purchase. Every purchase request came through me, I’d approve, decline, or ask for more info and then they’d come to our front desk to use the card.

I interacted with students daily regarding their events and finances while my coworker dealt with them on all aspects of student activities. He was contacted by a couple of students who wanted to start a new student org for a gun club. He turned them down because it went against university policy to promote guns on campus and they showed up one day with a faculty advisor determined to get their organization approved. It was a heated debate, and after much back and forth with our office and the administration they were approved for a Historic Gun Club – the focus and interest being in vintage firearms. Once they were approved, the org president came in with a gift for me and my coworker. “My mom made these,” he said and we were given sugar cookies in the shape of a handgun.

The first year they were an org they were pretty active, the next year less so until spring. The org president contacted me to request to use the credit card to make a donation to a local shooting range in exchange for targets for shooting practice. I turned him down because we didn’t allow use of student activity funds for donations. It was pretty cut and dried on my end but then he looped the owner of the shooting range into the email and there were many emails back and forth regarding their rights. I bowed out and passed the email to my boss who declined it for the same reasons I did, and because from the onset it had been made clear that student funds were not going to be used for ammunition or targets.

The org president was at my desk often in the beginning to learn the ins and outs of requesting and using budgeted funds. He wanted to know every detail and I’d go over it and then a few days later he’d stop by and I’d go over it again. “I don’t want to mess this up,” he said and I told him it was a learning process and once he’d done it a time or two he’d be fine and not to worry. He was always polite and very nerdy. I wanted to tell him that chicks love nerds, that I was married to a science nerd, and that to me he seemed far too sweet to be swept up in the gun culture, but my job was managing money not giving life advice to young adults who weren’t asking.

*****

Last week I was getting ready to leave work when I checked the news and heard of the shooting in Uvalde. The story was unfolding and as the hours went by it kept getting worse. That night I checked on my daughter, the one who has spent the last thirteen years inside an elementary school, and she was not okay. As a librarian, she told me, it would be impossible to hide twenty kids in her space and what about her own daughter down the hall?

The next day I went out to lunch with her and my granddaughter and couldn’t stop staring at Mabel. How in God’s name could anyone go into a school and take their rage out on children? And how do we continue to allow this to happen over and over and over? Mabel brought along her Disney cookbook to show me all the recipes that she and her mom are going to make this summer. When the check came she said she would pay for it and gave me a nickel from her sequined mermaid purse then skipped to the car under her umbrella, the one she was swinging around earlier when her mom had told her she needed to learn umbrella etiquette. “What’s etiquette?” she asked. “It’s manners, Mabel,” her mom said, “so you don’t hurt anybody when you’re using it.

*****

I was at my desk cleaning up student org accounts getting ready for our audit after the academic year ended. I opened an email requesting that a student be removed from all mail lists immediately due to his sudden death. I saw the name and jumped out of my desk to talk to my boss.

His name was Ryan, he had graduated a week earlier with a masters degree in engineering, he was the president of a gun club at an urban college, and the cause of death was a self-inflicted gunshot wound.