Please keep kids safe from guns: How Trump replied to a 7-year-olds anguished letter

[riversedge]

‘Please keep kids safe from guns’: How Trump replied to a 7-year-old’s anguished letter


https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/please-keep-kids-safe-from-guns-how-trump-replied-to-a-7-year-olds-anguished-letter/2018/02/04/5b8d9f9a-079b-11e8-8777-2a059f168dd2_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_trumpletter-850%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.f20d85b34f62



By John Woodrow Cox February 4 at 9:29 PM

Ava Olsen was on the playground with other first-graders during a 2016 school shooting in Townville, S.C., that took the life of Jacob Hall, 6. She is now home-schooled because of her PTSD. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)

The manila envelope arrived on Mary Olsen’s doorstep the day after Christmas, and in its top left corner were three words that stopped her: “THE WHITE HOUSE.”
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Fifteen months earlier, on a fall afternoon in tiny Townville, S.C., Ava had just walked outside her school for recess when, police say, a 14-year-old drove up to the playground in a Dodge Ram, jumped out of the pickup and pointed a gun. The accused teenager — who is expected to learn this month whether he’ll be tried as an adult — continued firing for just 12 seconds before his pistol jammed. By then, three people at Townville Elementary School had been shot.

[First-graders are haunted by what they survived — and lost — on a school playground]
0:48
Six-year-old shot in South Carolina schoolyard dies

Jacob Hall, the 6-year-old who was shot when a teenager opened fire at a South Carolina elementary school, died from his wounds on Oct. 1, 2016. (Reuters)
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Three days later, Jacob died.

Ava was so overwhelmed by the loss, and the terror of what she’d witnessed, that a doctor later diagnosed the girl with post-traumatic stress disorder and recommended that she be home-schooled. In the months that followed, the torment — described in a Washington Post story about the shooting — often consumed her. She yanked out her eyelashes and used stickers to cover up scary words in “Little House on the Prairie”: gun, fire, blood, kill.

Although she didn’t go to school anymore, her younger brother, Cameron, who had also been outside that afternoon, did. Ava, her brown eyes serious and her mind seldom at rest, worried about him and the millions of other children still spending their days in classrooms and cafeterias and playgrounds. So, one morning last summer, she sat at her kitchen table with a pencil and a sheet of notebook paper.

“Dear Mr. President,” Ava printed in neat block letters, before explaining that she’d lived through a school shooting. “I heard and saw it all happen and I was very scared. My best friend, Jacob, was shot and died. That made me very sad. I loved him and was going to marry him one day. I hate guns. One ruined my life and took my best friend.”




Jacob Hall was fatally wounded on the playground at Townville Elementary on Sept. 28, 2016. (Kerry Burriss)




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Ava’s letter to President Trump. (Mary Olsen)

She asked how the president would protect children from more school shootings.

“Please,” she concluded, “keep kids safe from guns.”







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[Read Ava’s full letter to President Trump]

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Now, though, she was sitting on her couch just after Christmas, staring at a reassuring letter signed by the most powerful man in the world.







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The letter from President Trump to Ava. (Mary Olsen)

“Wow,” said Ava, now 8.

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“He didn’t say how he could keep kids safe,” Ava told her mom. So on Jan. 8, she sat down to write another letter.

Ava thanked him for the response and the promised prayers.

“I sometimes still think about that day in my head thinking it will happen again,” she wrote. “If you have the time, I have some ideas to help keep kids and schools safe. Sometimes people who live through a school shooting have better ideas.”

[Read Ava’s second letter to the president]

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“Students fearing for their lives while they’re attempting to get an education is unacceptable,” Sanders said, but she offered no specific plans the administration had to stop school shootings...........................

[marble falls]

1. Poor kid. The President doesn't have a clue.

[world wide wally]

2. Hedoesn't dare say he will do anything sensible... That would take courage

Something Trump has no idea of