The only research I could really do was to visit the website of [name of gun-based business]. The top of the page was all about getting your guns engraved, which struck me as odd. Engraved guns? Must be a part of the culture. I asked my husband about this (he’s a country boy who’s been around guns his whole life) and these are his exact words: “It’s like getting a tattoo on your dick. It’s stupid.” But that’s neither here nor there.
Additionally, it seems transfers of ownership are also performed at this location. I scrolled further down the website and saw that you could also get a custom holster the size of a cupcake. Yum!
Then we got to the real shit: Complete Handgun $175, Complete Revolver $200, Complete AR $450+. Whether they are selling, buying, or rubbing them in oil and putting them up their bums really makes no difference to me. We are less than 1,000 feet from an elementary school. A place where hundreds of parents send their precious little lives every day, trusting they’ll be safe. A place where 5-year-olds and 6-year-olds have to participate in lock-down drills just in case someone comes in, or drives by when the kids are out at recess, carrying a newly-engraved or newly-transferred AR and does the unthinkable.
Anyway, I’d been speaking up lately about climate change and healthcare, I’d even begun a run for a local office that required me overcoming intense social anxiety to knock on doors and collect signatures of people I didn’t know so I could get on the ballot. Additionally, I was attending social events and forcing myself to be way more outgoing than I had theretofore felt comfortable with. I knew the time had come.
I was literally shaking — as I’m shaking while typing this — when I pulled up the map on my computer and screen-shotted the area close to our school. I added a red circle around our elementary school and a red circle around the home where the gun shop is located, and made a notation that it was 0.2 miles away from the school. I then took a deep breath and posted it to our school PTC’s Facebook page (258 members) with the caption: “Does it terrify anyone else that someone’s running a gun shop out of their home 0.2 miles away from where our children go to school? Does anyone know if there are rules about how far away they have to be?”
– Janette DeFelice, MD, MA in What Happened When I Spoke Up about the (Completely Legal) Home-Based Gun Shop Less Than 1,000 Feet from our Elementary School