To be clear, in the wake of this nation’s most recent AR-15-assisted school murders, third graders in Neosho, Missouri, did not decide to hold a fundraising raffle awarding an AR-15 assault rifle to some lucky town citizen.
It was the adults that did that. The third graders are selling the raffle tickets because the adults around them decided that for them.
The raffle was launched before the shooting, but Levi Patterson, the coach of the team in Neosho for boys 9 and younger, told The Kansas City Star he plans to continue with the fundraiser. […]
The weapon was donated as a prize by a team father and co-founder of Neosho gun manufacturer Black Rain Ordnance Inc., which is currently pitching a Spec15 AR pistol on its Facebook page.
Nine-year-olds did not suddenly decide to hold a baseball fundraiser featuring an assault rifle responsible for murdering hundreds of schoolchildren and other Americans in recent years. But when the currency of your community is deadly weapons, deadly weapons it will be.
Patterson said “our hearts break” for the victims of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. But he added that gun raffles “have been going on for years. Evil has and will always exist.”
Patterson said none of the children on his team will be forced to sell raffle tickets for the weapon if they’re uncomfortable doing so.
That’s fortunate. There may be a child or two in America who, after watching news coverage of a school very much like their own being turned into a killing field by yet another of the various Americans who woke up one morning and decided that somebody around them needed murdering, in accordance with the core NRA principle that every American be allowed to decide who needs murdering on any given morning—there may be a child or two in America who, after watching news coverage of a horrific murder at a school that looks very much like their own, shudders at handing out fliers asking the adults of their community to try their hand at winning the same weapon. It is good that they can opt out, even if the children of America have absolutely no say themselves in whether their schools, movie theaters, or own living rooms become the sites of their own necessary-for-the-good-of-us-all executions.