My found poem is titled “He has a battle rifle” and it is taken from a Texas Tribune article with the same name. The article is about the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, and it specifically focuses on the lack of police intervention during the shooting. Reading this article made me angry because it makes it clear that more lives could have been saved if the police had stepped in sooner. I understand how incomprehensibly terrifying that situation must be. I don’t know what I personally would do, but that’s why I’m not a cop and don’t plan on becoming one. It is part of the job of the police to be prepared to lay down their lives to protect the innocent, especially children. An especially frustrating detail is that some of the officers were armed with the same gun as the shooter, an AR-15, and yet still did not feel adequately prepared to diffuse the situation. A common argument against gun control is that restricting firearms would prevent “good guys with guns” from stopping “bad guys with guns.” This situation calls into question the validity of that argument: who cares that the good guy and the bad guy have the same weapon if the good guy is too afraid to use it?
In this found poem, I attempted to somewhat tell the story of that day while also reflecting on the aftermath. My method was to create a narrative by pulling lines from different sections of the article to create a throughline. I wanted the beginning to feel choppy and disconnected to mimic the confusion and panic that everyone involved felt that day. I also wanted to include the snippet of a conversation between two officers to emphasize how harrowing it was for them to realize that the shooter was carrying an AR-15. I edited sentences in multiple places, most significantly in the section that says “cowardice, or poor leadership, or a lack of sufficient training killed 19 children and two teachers.” The actual article said nothing of the sort, but I made an artistic choice to splice words and make a bold condemnation rather than passively reporting. Intentionally, the largest block of text is at the bottom and reminds us that a year after this tragedy, Texas has still not even considered implementing stricter gun control laws. It feels as if no amount of lost lives will be enough to convince some people, particularly government officials, that change is necessary. However difficult it may be, it is important to continue these conversations and be loud about the need for gun control in America.
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Hi Kara! I was drawn to your poem just by the title of it. Just the title alone gets the readers to think of so many different tragedy’s that have happened with the use of a rifle. When reading your poem from start to finish the first time, I understood what the whole poem itself was about. But then when I read it again, I got a deeper meaning of how school shooting are one of the worst tragedy’s to happen. Knowing it includes innocent children, teacher, and other staff members that work in the school district, truly has a strand on my heart. Using certain words like “AR-15” and “gunman”, shows the readers that these words are starting to be used more and more often due to the increase of number of school shootings. Reading this poem makes it an eye opener on how these innocent people are dying with no cause that is killing so many people. I loved the way had your words to have. a little bit of space to make the readers think more of the topic. By saying this, reading your poem helped guided the readers to the theme of this poem.
Hey Kara, I thought your poem was very impactful. I also did my poem revolving the recent uproar in school shootings that have occurred. It is shameful and infuriating that these young innocent children are being murdered in cold blood. I like how you structured your poem as well, the beginning being a moment by moment narration of the shooter which is then followed by the consequences of a lack of response. Delayed intervention, delayed medical services, those things are unacceptable especially when lives are at stake. You have a very impactful poem about a very serious issue that our country currently faces. Hopefully in the future, change will be made to prevent such tragedies from happening. But once again I really enjoyed your poem and how powerful your statement on the issue was.