Do not come to America

This belief column was submitted by Melissa Siig, a mother of three and a Tahoe Metropolis resident.
Expensive university student,
I know you the moment experienced goals of learning abroad in the United States, of currently being immersed in the culture you have arrive to admire from our films and Television displays that we export overseas. You believed you would occur to The usa to find out English, to are living in the vicinity of the sunny beaches of California or the bustling towns of New York or Chicago. You believed you would arrive in this article to encounter the newness and openness of The us, to dwell in the region of Hollywood and Silicon Valley, of Wall Avenue and Disneyland, of Harvard and UCLA, of football game titles and promenade queens and kings.
Unfortunately, I am listed here to tell you a single point: Do not occur. It is not harmless right here. We simply cannot defend you. Our educational institutions have been sacrificed to the altar of guns.
I was a overseas exchange pupil when I was 16. I used 6 months dwelling with a host relatives and heading to high university on the west coast of France. I am now 50 years previous and to this working day I however price the incredible working experience I had dwelling and studying overseas. I arrived back to the states fluent in French and with a bigger understanding of a further place, Europe and how the earth sights my possess country.
Right now, I would tell all possible foreign trade learners and their parents – do not select The united states. Our schools are not harmless. Gun violence is now the main bring about of dying for kids and teenagers in the U.S., surpassing car or truck incidents and drug overdoses. We have had 27 school shootings this 12 months by itself, and the yr is only 50 percent more than.
If you want to find out English, pick Canada or Australia or the Uk. Following dealing with mass shootings, these nations around the world took decisive action like banning assault weapons, necessitating qualifications checks and a waiting around period to purchase guns, and instituting a gun amnesty application. These international locations have viewed number of to no mass shootings considering the fact that. The U.S., on the other hand, has experienced much more mass shootings than any other nation in the world given that 2009, there have been 274 mass shootings in America.
So tell me, expensive university student, do you truly want to come to the U.S. to study? Do you definitely want to go to school in a state that values its guns far more than its young children? Do you want to reside in a place wherever following a mass capturing that killed 19 innocent university children and two instructors the NRA even now thought it was a good notion to maintain its annual convention just 300 miles from in which the massacre took position?
I, for 1, do not. And yet I feel helpless to alter our gun legislation, I truly feel helpless to fight versus a gun lobby that has this kind of a restricted grip on this country that not even the death of little ones, around and about and above once more, does everything to shift the needle on sensible gun manage laws. Expensive pupil — do you know that The us has a law that shields gun companies from lawsuits? We, as citizens who desperately want to secure our have small children and cherished ones, currently do not have the suitable to sue firearm organizations from their deadly contribution to mass shootings.
Expensive overseas trade university student — do not appear to The us. Our universities are not protected. Our grocery retailers and bars and live performance halls are not protected. We can not secure you. We have selected in its place to defend the ideal to bear arms above all else, even about the most innocent and valuable among us, our small children.
Melissa Siig is the mom of 3 youngsters — two in superior college and 1 in center faculty — and lives in Tahoe City, California. She has been a journalist and editor for 20 a long time.
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