How do we sleep at night?

I can’t sleep. 

But I’m so tired. My heart keeps racing and my nerves are jangling in my head like bangles.

The ceiling fan stirs hot air above me but doesn’t add any pleasantries. It makes an odd sound, a metallic scrape, leaving me unsettled. How safe can that be?

I check my phone.

Nothing.

It doesn’t happen as much these days, but sometimes I swim into the murky waters of opinion when I believe I am right. It doesn’t matter that no one ever saves the other by trying to sink their ideas. No one seems to drown.

Guns piercing schools seems to be my trigger.

I’m arguing with a woman in Texas, whom I’ve never met but whose children share a digital universe with mine where they play and smile and pose for the camera.

We are venting our fears. Communicating ideas. But ultimately speaking into a void.

We are together in pain and worry and fear until ... we talk about solutions.

“We need to do something to stop this ... Don’t tell me gun control is the answer.”

“Guns don’t kill people. ...”

She tells me we have enough laws. Laws don’t protect people. Her husband tells me we need religion and corporal punishment and family values. They tell me we can’t stop people from killing people.

It’s the same argument playing out across generations all over the country. It’s a needle stuck in a groove.

They want tighter security. Better healthcare. More religion. Stronger accountability. Stricter parenting. More guns.

They also want to pay fewer taxes. And be free to be a responsible gun owner not under the burdens of more onerous oversight. The laws we have already say they are responsible gun owners and that is all the law will allow. 

They have the right to protect their own with guns.

I can’t express how crazy it seems to me that we can’t (or won’t) regulate guns the way we regulate cars. You know ... licensing and registration, insurance and periodic inspections, and regulations that hold manufacturers accountable. 

They've stood their ground the legislation of tighter safety controls in the name of privacy, a right we've relinquished for automobiles, air travel and single-box purchases of Pseudoephedrine. 

The results are indisputable:

Auto deaths are declining while gun deaths on the rise.

I argue that is the result of well-crafted laws.

It’s not as if we’ve done nothing. 

We have already fortified schools. We have stationed police in them. We have spent precious time from the business of education so that our kids can practice surviving.

We can add metal detectors and barbed wire and block out the windows. We can harden our schools and our children. But that is untenable.

Soon, I imagine, we’ll be strapping the staff with sidearms and subjecting our kids to mental health evaluations as a requirement of being admitted to the school building because crazy ideas will seem reasonable if you just repeat them over and over and over again. Like guns being an inviolable right.

Guns don't kill people.

The so-called responsible gun owners apparently don’t kill people either. But it seems from one shooting to the next, some of their children do.

But there are glimmers of hope.

Many of our children, from both sides of the political aisle, are raising their voices.

Last week hundreds of students and activists from New Yorkers Against Gun Violence rallied at the Capitol Building to urge the State Senate to pass a bill for Extreme Risk Prevention Orders before their legislative session ends in June.

The law would create a new type of court-issued protection order that allows family members and other domestic relations to seek the temporary removal of guns as well as the prohibition of firearm purchases when there is evidence the person poses a threat to themselves or others.

Laws of this type have already been enacted in eight other states, including Connecticut, California, Florida, Maryland, Oregon, Vermont and, Washington.

I can only hope our children keep using their voices ... and the ballot when they are old enough to vote.

I hope, for the sake of all of us, that our children win. 

They won't have to ask themselves how they sleep at night.