Guns Don't Kill People... Oh Wait, They Do.

I don't know anything more about this story than is told in the article. Unknown gunman shooting at a house, hit a sleeping 11-year old, expected to survive. However, I know this much: this is not a unique occurrence. It made it to the news because it injured an innocent kid. Sometimes those stories don't make it. Sometimes they miss the kid and everyone just goes on with their lives.

In my second year of teaching, I got a note that said, "Please excuse my daughter from not doing her homework. The gangs was shooting and she had to sleep in the closet." Other kids would talk about sleeping in the bathtub in case bullets from drive-by shootings went through walls, they probably wouldn't go through the bathtub too. I was so shocked that I didn't even know how to respond.

These kids live like this. Not once in their lifetime, but many, many nights, they hear shooting and they are afraid, they sleep in the closet or the bathtub to give the bullet more obstacles, or (maybe the worst option), they just keep sleeping because they are used to it. This is not in an official war zone, not in the Third World, but less than four miles from some of the most affluent houses I tutor at.

There are so many things wrong with this, I don't know how to begin. The fact that we have this kind of poverty so close to extreme wealth. The fact that gun rights people keep talking about how guns don't kill people and they're just a tool (no one is seeing drive-by knife throwings!). The fact that my family, my friends, and my own self don't ever have to think about this, ever, because we have enough money to not live in an area where we might accidentally be shot in our sleep, but my Little Sister doesn't. Or that in what I think is still the most prosperous, powerful nation in the world has children who are completely used to the danger of being ACCIDENTALLY SHOT IN THEIR SLEEP.

I don't even know what to say or do.

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Stuffed Animals

There are several much more serious stories I was going to share, but I'm not in the mood to be made sad tonight, so I'll tell you all about the stuffed animals. This is a post that needs images so someday when I have or borrow a working scanner, I will add the photos. A few years into teaching, I joined Freecyle. For those of you who don't know Freecycle, it's a group of people in any given community who are on an email list to get rid of their old stuff and get stuff from other people. It's a fabulous form of recycling. Somebody posted that they had a huge bag of stuffed animals in good condition to give away and I decided to grab it for my class. I thought that some of the kids would like the stuffed animals, but I certainly didn't think they'd all be into them. Kids grow up really fast in that neighborhood, and when you have six-year olds talking about how they walk to school alone because their parents say they're "grown," and how

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