This is the most selfish moment in American history

We are drafting children to die in a war that is being fought over the freedom to own an AR-15

On June 27, 1969, LIFE magazine published an issue with a photograph of U.S. Army Specialist William C. Gearing, Jr. on its cover.  Inside were the names and photographs of 241 other soldiers who had been killed during a single week in Vietnam between May 28 and June 3, 1969.  The numbers of the dead were “average for any seven-day period during this stage in the war,” LIFE reported.

The magazine had a circulation of about 8 million and for purposes of ad sales claimed that three times that number read the magazine, as people found it in doctors’ offices and the homes of relatives and friends.  LIFE was the closest thing we had at that time to what Facebook is today, something that was shared and seen by tens of millions of Americans.

By the summer of 1969, the war in Vietnam was more than five years old and had become more and more unpopular.  Dozens of young Americans were being killed every day, but people knew about the deaths in the war one by one, as someone from their town was sent home in a casket, or a funeral was held at a church down the street.

But now here, for the first time, were photographs of the dead all in one place.  When that issue was published, it caused an earthquake.  Almost 250 had been killed in a single week “fighting for their country,” as it was said.  Anti-war sentiment almost immediately went up.  That fall, in September, President Richard Nixon announced his first troop reduction in Vietnam, pulling 35,000 soldiers out of the country.  There were massive Moratorium demonstrations against the war in October and November, and in December, Nixon changed the draft from a system of call-ups by local Draft Boards to a national lottery by birthdays and reduced the total number of men drafted.

I looked up the statistics for that war.  A third of the more than 58,000 killed in Vietnam were draftees serving against their will.  You could be jailed for refusing to be drafted, and many were.  Even more dodged the draft by various means.  Some young men even left the country and moved to Canada or Sweden or another friendly country rather than be called up to serve in a war they didn’t want to fight.

If 30 percent of the 242 young men pictured in LIFE magazine that June were drafted, it means at least 72 of them had been killed fighting in a war they didn’t volunteer for.  The draft and its inequitable distribution of those who got called up to serve, largely in the army, was a big factor in opposition to the war.  As John Kerry would put it in Senate testimony in 1971, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” 

I am here to tell you that we have reached that moment with guns in this country.  According to figures from the Gun Violence Archive, at least 653 children have been killed by guns in America so far this year.  According to the New England Journal of Medicine, 12 children under the age of 18 die from gun violence every day.  The Brady Campaign calculates that nearly 8,000 children were shot with a firearm and more than 1,600 were killed every year between 2015 and 2019.  According to the Centers for Disease Control, guns are now the leading cause of death for children, outpacing even automobile crashes.  One in ten deaths from gunfire are children, according to the CDC.

So far this year, 24 children have been killed in school mass shootings. None of those 24 children killed in school shootings asked to go to school.  They were sent by their parents, in most cases because state laws required school attendance.  Apart from suicide by gun, which is the second most frequent method of suicide among children, none of the children who were killed by gunfire wanted to die. 

All those children were drafted to serve in a war that is being fought over the “freedom” to buy and own and carry and use guns, including the gun used most often in mass killings, the AR-15 style semiautomatic rifle.  None of those children volunteered.

Just as we drafted more than 70 young men against their will and sent them to die in a single week in 1969 in a war that never should have been fought, we are drafting children to die in a war that should not be fought today.  It is being fought because one political party, the Republican Party, is using gun ownership as one of their major political issues.  Republicans are quite literally walking over the backs of dead children to get power and stay in power.

How do you ask a child to be the last one to die for the mistake we’re making about guns in this country today?  How many more children must die before we come to our senses and end this modern draft of the dead?