Is the innocence of childhood completely gone?

Remember those carefree days from our youth?  Where we would ride our bikes around the neighborhood - sometimes you would even get lost trying to find that one fun park you went to once before.  The days of playing tag with the neighborhood kids until dusk.  Going to school to learn - and to hang out with your friends of course.

Oh the innocence of childhood and even of adolescence.

My daughter is only 2, so that may have something to do with this feeling... but I don't really want Sami riding her bike by herself around the neighborhood.  Or playing tag until dusk without supervision.  It makes me sound like I'll be super overprotective, which isn't something I want to be.

The world today doesn't seem to be what it was 30 years ago, dare I even say 20 years ago.  Perhaps it's just because of how connected we are to the whole world thanks to Mr. Internet?

I grew up in a quiet suburb of Montreal, Quebec (Canada) where you didn't really hear about guns.  I didn't really learn about mass shootings until I was just about to graduate from high school, when the Columbine Shooting occurred. I had no idea where Columbine was.  Soon after the shooting, there were many news reports or articles that recounted the events of a mass shooting that had occurred in Montreal in the late 1980s.  A man killed 14 women at l'École Polytechnicque (Montreal) because he had issues with feminism and women in general.  At least that's what I remember of the story.

To my recollection, there were 2 other shootings in Colleges/Universities while I still lived in Montreal.  At Concordia University and at Dawson College.  My brothers attended Concordia.  I took classes at Concordia.  I have friends that attended both establishments.  It was frightening, but the incidents seemed isolated enough that it wasn't something I worried about constantly.  They became sad events I had heard about and soon distant memories.

We weren't as connected to the rest of the world as we are now with all the different media avenues, but we received the newspaper daily which I perused.  We watched the news around dinner time too.

I haven't lived in Canada for 10 years now and I'm not sure what the gun laws look like now.  I'm not big on politics.  I believe that they are pretty restricted though.  Growing up, guns weren't something that seemed to concern our community.  Crime was pretty low, though not nonexistent.  I remember that my neighbor's house was burglarized in the middle of the night while they were out of town.  But never ever did I hear about stories as horrible as the ones I've been hearing or reading about for the past 5-6 years.


The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting of late 2012 rocked me to my very core.  How crazy had the world become for completely innocent and unknowing children to become targets of what I can only call a madman?  My heart ached for the parents and the families.  I wasn't a mother yet myself, but I had yearned for children and had suffered at least one miscarriage.  I knew loss, but not to that extent.  Or at least not to the extent that I know it today.

For a long time after my son died, I avoided listening to the news and reading websites about current events.  I couldn't totally escape them, because people will talk about them, or write about them on Facebook.  I've read some horrible stories - I wrote about a few on my SpreadHappinessForPreston blog - My aversion to news.

The stories I wrote about are etched in my brain and in my heart.  I have a terrible memory - ask my husband.  But these stories, I remember reading every gruesome detail.  They still make my blood boil.  They've also instilled fear into my life.  Recent events have multiplied that fear.

All parents fear for their children, I get that.  However, school should be a place where children and teens are safe.  School should be about education, socialization and fun.  Yet, these school shootings keep occurring.

For a while, people blamed guns.  And then it was mental health.  I don't know the correct answer, but I feel like it's somewhere in between.  I get it that in America it's a citizen's right to protect their property and family.  However, who needs automatic weapons for this?  Shouldn't those be reserved for the military?  I profoundly believe that these horrible massacres wouldn't have been as terrible if automatic weapons weren't so easy to obtain, or dare I even say if they were banned.  Didn't the world used to ban books?  Is it inconceivable that certain types of weapons could/should be banned?  I don't know enough about guns to say much more.

I've been wanting to write about this for weeks now; since the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Florida.  Everything was still too fresh though.  I wanted time to gather my thoughts and composure.


Whatever I'm doing, if Sami is around - I don't like not being able to see her.  I need to be close.  I don't want anything to happen to her.  Don't get me wrong, I want her to have her own experiences and learn from her mistakes.  That's what life is about.  But I'm scared.  I don't look forward to her first day of kindergarten because of all these shootings, and threats made against schools.  They have drills for that.  The only drills I ever had were fire drills.  Times are a changing...

I'm frightful of the day where she'll want to go over to someone's house I don't know.  How do you ask another parent if they have guns in the house without offending them.  And if they have guns, where are they?  Is there any possibility that the kids could access them?  How do you let down your child if you don't feel comfortable with it?

I wish these weren't fears I have.

I wish these weren't fears many parents.

I wish these weren't fears our children are going to have.