Dear Mr. President,
My name is Maya Justine. I am five and a half years old. I am in kindergarten and I really like it and I like my teacher because she's super nice. Every morning the principal comes on the PA and welcomes us. She's also nice. I like her. There are five hundred kids in my school. Every one is proud that we are one of the best schools in the state. We have three grades and kindergarten. We are a school just like the one in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, in a town the same size. At 9:41 this morningm when I was in class, the temperature was around thirty-seven degrees "Fahrenheit" just like it was there.
On the day I was born Daddy got the day's newspaper and saved it for me to read one day when I'm old enough to understand what the people who write those newspapers thought was important for people to know on that day. There might not even be such a thing as a "newspaper" by then. The headline on the front page of that newspaper is not a happy one. Newspaper headlines are often not happy. On that day it was talking about a crazy person in college who, the day before, walked into his school and shot and killed a whole bunch of people.
Today another crazy person walked into a school just like mine and into a kindergarten class just like mine. He killed the principal. He killed the teacher. He killed the children. He didn't know the children. They say he might have known the teacher. The teacher he might have known was not there. Maybe they had a substitute. I like having substitute teachers. It's fun. This was not fun.
He killed twenty kids. There are twenty-one kids in my class. There were only twenty at the start of the year but then Josh came and we were twenty-one so now all the tables have the same number of kids. If you take twenty away from twenty-one that leaves one. I know that much math. I cannot imagine being the only one alive in a classroom full of dead people. I would be very scared. I would cry.
Mr. President, it will be years before I know about all this because Daddy does not often watch news on the television and would surely not let me watch this. It will be years before "meaningful action" means anything to me in the sense in which you use it. Your warm words of grief will have grown cold and faded by the time I'm old enough to need them. But if I were one of those kids in that school that time would be now. I am too young for this. I am not ready.
I don't really know a whole lot about guns. I know my brother and my sister like shooting them at the range. Mommy was real good at shooting with them in the army. Daddy was terrible at it. People in the movies have guns. My brother's video games have guns. Sometimes I sneak in when Mommy is watching Bones and they also have guns. Bugs Bunny gets chased by people with guns but it's a cartoon so they always make it look funny and he bends their guns and makes them poke through a log or a hole behind them so they shoot themselves in the butt.
I am five and a half years old and have only so much to say. I know that I am impatient to grow up but for now just let me be a child like every other for as long as I may. I do not want to know that I am growing up in a world which not only makes it easy but also allows it to make sense to any stranger who's coo coo for cocoa puffs (this is my favorite phrase this month) to come to my school and kill my friends or for my sister's crazy boyfriend to go after her at work or for someone to go to the mall and kill people for no reason at all like that guy did a couple of days ago in Oregon.
I am five and a half years old. I want to have to concern myself with none of this. I want to be safe at school and learn how to make snowmen out of cotton balls. I want to relax at the movies without putting my Hello Kitty handbag through a metal detector. I want not to have to worry about some psycho with a rifle jumping out of Santa's Grotto. I do not want to be the answer to some violent, armed lunatic's unsolved problems.
What will it take to start working on ways of giving my family a fighting chance at not having to randomly and unpredictably share the same space at the same time with the weapons and the whackjobs? What will it take, Mr. President?
Will it take twenty more kids like me?