Editor,
I do dog rescue. I’ve fought for years to get a law passed that says you can’t put a dog on a chain for longer than 12 hours in a 24-hour period. The counties surrounding Marion County have no laws in place to protect dogs. You’d think that would be common decency, the least we could do for an animal that is domesticated, right? Wrong. I’ve been relentless, but hard as I’ve tried, I haven’t been able to make any changes in the law. I think I need to turn this over to the young people. They are the movers and shakers that are going to get things done.
I am so proud of them but ashamed that as adults, we should have protected our children. After 20 little children were slaughtered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut by a shooter with an assault rifle, I remember thinking, “If this doesn’t change our gun laws, nothing will.” Well, it didn’t. The almighty dollar was more important than innocent little lives. Five years later and hundreds of lives lost to mass shootings, and nothing has changed. Well, our young people aren’t going to stand for it anymore. They are going to do what we ignored and didn’t do. If Congress doesn’t make sensible gun laws, do background checks and ban assault rifles to civilians, they will vote them out. Assault rifles are for the military and have no place in the hands of civilians.
Again, I can’t tell you how proud I am of our young people. They will get things accomplished where we failed.
The school walk outs were for a great cause. The message? “We will not idly stand by while our friends and peers are dying. We will not sit in our classroom in fear thinking, ‘Could we be next?’”
I stand with them 100 percent, and so should the school faculty. Their lives matter. They are our children and grandchildren. They are our future for a better world and they are smarter than us adults.
Joy Wilkins, Fishers
