Studio Pathways' Public Statement on Mass Shootings in U.S. Schools
Mar 30, 2023
The hard truth is that many of our schools have never been safe spaces for the young. Creating spaces of belonging entails creating schools and societies that love our students.
The current partisan governmental refusal to implement gun control and to place personal profit over the lives of our children is a refusal to activate care, love and a belief that we are all sentient beings. We understand this refusal as nothing but pure malicious intent to perpetuate a long-standing agenda that favors core archaic beliefs placing profit over people, and a biased and limited vision of what freedom looks like.
Freedom is not fear. Freedom is not violence. Freedom is love and expanding the circle of human concern.
We cannot maintain an education system that refuses to love our children, or that refuses to love our teachers. Teaching should not be a death sentence. Going to school should not be a death sentence.
We must continue to refuse any form of leadership that ignores the rampant mortality of our children at the hands of gun violence.
The French term bricolage means to repair and create. We invite you to consider how we might each do our part to end access to assault weapons in the U.S., begin to bricolage- repair the harm being done, and create conditions that nurture all sentient forms of life, including our youngest members of humanity.
For an understanding of how we got here, please read the complex history of guns in the U.S. in Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment by Studio Pathways friend and shero, historian and author Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.
