The Virginia Tech football team announced that it will be
‘honoring’ the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victims alongside its own
2007 campus shooting with a helmet decal during today’s game with Rutgers.[1]
According to the Roanoke
Times[2],
the decal is half orange to represent the shootings at Virginia Tech and half
green to represent the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School. The decal
will also have the number 58 in the center, the total number of victims from
both shootings, along with the word “Prevail” written across it.
While the ‘honor’ paid by the Virginia Tech football team is
a high-minded gesture and a necessary societal method of coping with
unthinkable tragedies, it does little to actually solve the continuing problem
of gun violence in the country. The decal also shines a spotlight on the
killings during these two incidents, taking attention away from the more
systemic inner-city problems with gun violence[3].
What these types of ‘memorials’ or ways of ‘honoring’
victims seems to primarily do is relieve our sense of guilt and, by extension,
our drive to seek out and implement long-lasting solutions to the problems
which stretch across our society.
This is not to say that the victims of these shootings
should not be honored and remembered. Without a doubt, they should. But these
memorials and symbols of remembrance should not be the final step in the
process of ending senseless gun violence.
We live in a society where constant stimulation moves our
attention from one object to the next. As a result, we oftentimes lose sight of
the issues that most Americans would argue are the most important to us as a
country.
We can no longer shift our focus and lose sight of this
issue. We can best honor the victims of these two shootings, and those that
have largely gone unnoticed, by finding long-term solutions to the issue of gun
violence in America.
The solutions won’t be arrived at easily, but little in life
worth achieving comes with ease. Americans have proven time and again that we
can do anything we put our collective energies to. Now it is just a matter of
coming together and focusing on this common goal.
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