by Marian Wright Edelman
“He went there and shot my teacher—and told my teacher good night and shot her in the head. And then he shot some of my classmates . . . I thought he was going to come back to the room, so I grabbed the blood and put it all over me.”
This was from the devastating video testimony 11-year-old Uvalde, Texas fourth-grader Miah Cerillo shared with Congress on June 8. Miah was describing how she witnessed her teacher and classmates being murdered at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde on May 24, and how she survived the mass shooting by smearing herself with blood from the friend who had been killed next to her and then staying very quiet. Once again, as a nation, we have allowed our children’s nightmares to become real. Will this be the time we finally act to protect children, not guns?
Miah was the youngest of a group of survivors, family members, and witnesses who testified at this week’s Congressional hearing on the gun violence crisis to explain how gun violence has changed their lives forever. Miah’s pediatrician, Dr. Roy Guerrero, opened his own testimony by saying: “I was called here today as a witness. But I showed up because I am a doctor . . . I swore an oath. An oath to do no harm. After witnessing firsthand the carnage in my hometown of Uvalde, to stay silent would have betrayed that oath. Inaction is harm. Passivity is harm. Delay is harm.”
Dr. Guerrero explained that he attended Robb Elementary School as a child. He has been Miah’s doctor since she was born, including when she survived liver surgery as an infant, and he was grateful to recognize her at Uvalde Memorial Hospital the day of the shooting and see she had survived. But he also attended to two of her murdered classmates, and he described how their bodies had been so badly destroyed by the assault weapon that killed them that the blood-spattered cartoon characters on the clothes they had been wearing when they left home that morning were the only visible clues left to the children’s identities. Dr. Guerrero told the committee:
“I chose to be a pediatrician. I chose to take care of children. Keeping them safe from preventable diseases I can do. Keeping them safe from bacteria and brittle bones I can do. But making sure our children are safe from guns, that’s the job of our politicians and leaders. In this case, you are the doctors and our country is the patient. We are lying on the operating table, riddled with bullets like the children of Robb Elementary and so many other schools. We are bleeding out and you are not there. My oath as a doctor means that I signed up to save lives. I do my job. I guess it turns out that I am here to plead. To beg. To please, please do yours.”
The House responded later the same day by passing the “Protecting Our Kids Act,” a gun violence legislation package that includes raising the age to buy some automatic rifles.
