Our future generation is dead.

America is a land of freedom, but somebody is paying the price.

I am not a US citizen, nor I live in the US; never been there either. But the horrendous killings of the children and the teachers in Texas has left me disturbed.

I wrote a short story a few years ago named “The Last Republic Day”. The story begins with a morning where children are getting ready for school, one of them don’t want to go ’cause they don’t “feel good”, teachers getting ready for school and excited for the event that was going to happen.

The story ends with this line: “Mass shooting in Elementary School”.

I wrote the story for a contest, but it didn’t get selected, and I just kept it in my collection and forgot about it — until the story came true.

19 children and 2 teachers were killed in a mass shooting in Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. The gunman was an 18-year-old boy.

The above sentence alone depicts so many disturbing problems. 19 children were killed. CHILDREN??? What did they ever do to you? 2 teachers were killed for what? doing their job? The gunman was 18 years old. How the hell did he get the gun? It’s not like he just got the gun and went on shooting everybody. To have the guts to walk into a school and kill 21 people is not something people do when they hold a gun for the first time. He must have been doing this for a while.

I’m not familiar with the US Govt. structure and why they are not passing the “common-sense” gun control laws. Why the police waited for an hour to go inside the school and stop the shooting? Why the gunman had that gun in the first place? These are the questions that are plaguing everyone’s minds right now, but like always, we’re not going to get the answer. ‘Cause this is not the first time.

The ratio of 120.5 firearms per 100 residents in the US is just plain disturbing. How many more mass shootings will it take for this to change? Let’s see.

Let the above numbers sink in. Since 1991, there have been 13 mass killings in America. Since 2007, there was a mass shooting after every 2–3 years.

But I don’t want this article to steer away from the innocent children and teachers who were killed and focus on the oh so obvious shortcomings of the Govt. I want to honor them and praise them and wish that they rest in peace.

When they woke up on the morning of May 24th, they didn’t think that this was going to be their last day. Some of them might not have wanted to go to school, some of the children may have been sick and didn’t go, and some of them might have been excited for a new day at school. Maybe one of them wanted to become a doctor, or a writer, or a teacher just like those were killed, or maybe some wanted to become the president of the United States.

We send children to teach them to “dream big”, little did we know we sent them to a very unfair and cruel war where the only dream they were left them was staying alive.

Articles like this surface every time some tragedy like this happens, and after a few days, everything cools down and everyone goes back to their normal lives, except for the ones who have lost their loved ones. They don’t forget. The families of victims of The Las Vegas shooting still haven’t forgotten the horror, the families of the victims of Sandy Hook killings are still trying to cope up with what happened.

People say, “Life moves on”, but for once, let’s not move on from this. Get stuck on this. Be stubborn. Especially US citizens, do whatever you can do within your power. You know better than me.

As for the victims of the shooting, let’s not just remember them by this. Let’s not tag their families by this tragedy. Let’s remember the children and the teacher for the people that they were, because they were somebody’s daughter, son, sister, brother, mother.

Let’s pay our respects to them.