A day after President Obama called for broad new gun laws, the White House published on its YouTube channel videos of four children reading their own letters about guns.
The videos are part of what the White House promises will be an all-out effort by Mr. Obama’s administration to pass his gun proposals, drawing on the emotional reactions to the school shootings in Newtown, Conn.
Of course the videos have generated criticism from conservatives -- yet it's our children who are dying at younger ages than their counterparts in 16 other nations according to a recent study from the National Academy of Sciences -- and one of the most glaring reasons for this is children in the US are 20 times more likely to be killed by a gun.
The children in these videos are worried enough about the gun violence that they have written letters to Obama, they wanted to be heard, and they damn well deserve to be heard. So let's hear more:
In “A letter from Hinna,” Hinna Zeejah, 8, reads aloud what she wrote to Mr. Obama in the wake of the shootings.
“Mr. President, can we do something which will stop all of these terrible problems,” she says. “Can we stop using guns? I think if they are no guns on the street, no one could get hurt. Bullets don’t have eyes. It can hurt anyone.”
In another video, titled, “A letter from Julia,” Julia Stokes, 11, tells Mr. Obama that guns should be “very hard for people to buy.”
“The only thing they do is harm or kill,” Julia said. “I know that laws have to be passed by Congress, but I beg you to try very hard to make guns not allowed.”
