Daniel Mauser, 15
On their website that celebrates his life, the Mausers describe their son:
"He was a gentle, well mannered, mature, lovable child. He was not at all reluctant to hug his parents, even as a teen--he did it often. Daniel was a tenth grader at Columbine. He was shy and reserved, not someone who'd want to speak in front of an audience, yet he joined the debate team. Daniel was a slender 5'10" and not athletic, yet he joined the cross country team at school. He had a dry sense of humor."
Daniel was shot and killed in the library at Columbine. Crystal Woodman and Lindsay Elmore, who were both in the library under tables near Daniel and survived, told me about how he was brutally murdered. These accounts are in my play, "A Line in the Sand".
I interviewed, Daniel's father, Tom, on two different occasions. First in the fall of 1999, and then again in the spring of 2000. He had taken a leave of absence from his job for a year to fight for better gun control laws. You can read about it on his website for Daniel. (see link above)
Here is an excerpt from one of our interviews:
"My role is as a victim, in speaking to people and trying to personalize this issue and say, 'This is what happens, I’m gonna humanize this and make it real clear. This could’ve been you. This could’ve been you. This could’ve been you as a parent.' It happened to be me, and people need to take action on that.
My role is not to argue with the gun rights activist, cause I’ll never change his mind, and I’ll never be able to answer all his questions and all his challenges. My role is to say we can’t settle for the status quo. We have to have a change, in our attitudes, and also we have to address the violence that’s in our movies, in our video games, that, uh, is in our schools. We have to change things. If we just accept the status quo, then Columbine won’t be the last—it’s gonna happen again. Oh, of course it is. There’s nothing we’re doing to really address it. I don’t want to see that. I’m not wishing it, but it’s going to happen again. They said it wouldn’t after Paducah, after Pearl, after Jonesboro. So, it’s probably going to happen again. It’s a question of when and how bad it’s going to be. It’s gonna take awhile for this country to turn this thing around, to really address it; because we’re not really doing anything. I mean certainly the schools are starting to take more note and trying to do something, but it’s not gonna be in the schools, it’s gonna be in the families, you know.
As much as I speak for gun control, I’m not arguing that gun control is gonna stop this. It’s just the elements of violence. We are not addressing the elements of violence and what leads to violence…and because we can't do it, because it’s so deep rooted, the one thing you can do is address the tools of violence. There is no guarantee that we’re going to be able to change the minds and hearts in a short enough time period to protect ourselves well; and since we can’t, then we have to at least somehow address the tools. Both in terms of putting background checks in, de-glorifying guns, and then taking some of the environmental things that tend to numb us and teach us that it’s okay to have and use a gun. At least try to address those. Yeah, elimination of the tools won’t happen, but at least reducing them and addressing them in a different kind of way will at least help."
,
No comments:
Post a Comment