We Live in an Era of Ritual Child Sacrifice

Isabeau Dasho is the Assistant director of the Harris Writing Workshop and new mom.

Co-authored by Megan Sanders.

Recently I attended the “Death: Life’s Greatest Mystery” exhibit at the Chicago Field Museum. It was deft, approachable, and well handled. The curators took care with the horrific and scary bits, respectfully positioning objects and depictions of death so that onlookers could look away if they wanted. The exhibit covered ritual human sacrifice and contextualized the grisly practice, including the particular tragedy of child sacrifice. There’s a line in the exhibit about child sacrifice in ancient Peru about how children are chosen and that their parents had months, sometimes longer to prepare themselves for their child’s death.

I heard someone say at the exhibit “Thank God we’re past this.” And for a moment I too felt that wash of relief. That we lived in more enlightened times than 3000 years ago. Then I remembered Sandy Hook, Margorie Stoneman Douglas High School, Uvalde, Michigan State, and tragically this week, three children and three of their teachers in Nashville. Gun violence is now the number one killer of children in America. Not drownings, not car accidents, not sickness. Guns.

We are ritually sacrificing our children on the altar of the second amendment, and I am not prepared.

I do not want to have to remember what shoes she’s wearing, or the color of her jacket in order to be able to identify her remains. Because her little body will be so obliterated.

I’m not interested in discussing what the second amendment’s text means when it comes to infringement, I am interested in protecting my child from bullets. I am interested in her right to an open future, in the promise we make to each new generation of kids that they deserve to be safe and educated. How can she learn anything if her classroom is a war zone? That’s if she get to grow up at all. A young man in some Chicago neighborhoods is three more times likely to die by homicide than a U.S. soldier deployed in Afghanistan. What else can we do but train children to potentially die, even as it harms their mental well-being more than it promotes safety outcomes, when we’ve decided that the right to a gun is more important than any of the other guarantees in the constitution, like life and the pursuit of happiness.

How can parents send their children to classrooms, any classroom, from kindergarten to college thinking “it won’t be mine”? Because the awful truth is that it might be. We live in a country that is exceptional at letting its children die. Wherever younger perpetrators, children really, are killing more children and themselves all the time.

And here is where I think of the holy man of yore telling a family that their child is special, that their child will defeat the famine, prevent the forest fire, ensure the crop. They’re just like me—except I’m being told that it’s noble to live in a country so free that guns are easier to access than health care, where there are more than 390 million guns for 330 million people. That my child is lucky to live in a place where she’s free to sit in a classroom that could at any moment erupt into lethal violence. Because at 18 she can buy a gun, or perhaps a weapon of war even more easily, than she can access a basic right to abortion.

Americans now sacrifice the blood of our children at the altar of freedom.

Now I am living with it as a parent, instead of a child (Columbine happened when I was 10 years old) knowing that at any moment I might get that horrific phone call—that tap on the shoulder that tells me my child was gunned down to ensured that someone somewhere could feel safer knowing that he has a weapon of war.

I won’t be proud. I won’t be comforted with the knowledge that I am entitled to a well-regulated militia, or that I can legally conceal weapons on my person almost anywhere.

My child’s death won’t feel like freedom, it will feel like the world ending. The world has ended for too many parents and communities—for a religion many of us neither practice, or participate in.

So, let’s stop the ritual child sacrifice now. We know how. Universal background checks, universal gun safety storage requirements, and giving red flags laws teeth. More importantly Congress must pass these laws at the federal level—because as we see here in Chicago strict gun laws don’t matter if you can legally purchase firearms just across the border. We must federally ban bump stocks and mods that turn already deadly weapons into tools of mass murder. Most Americans agree on these regulations. Hell, most gun owners agree.

While it is true that even these regulations won’t be able to stop every tragedy, at least we will be able to say it’s wrong to sacrifice children.

And we did something to stop it.

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