A Toddler, Teacher, and Goleta City Council Member Walk Into a Gun Store

Though a sophomore at San Marcos, for some reason I can no longer recall, I was visiting my father in Central Texas on April 20, 1999. It was characteristically too hot to go outside that day, and if I did, there was little to do beyond exploring the arid landscape crawling with fire ants, rattlesnakes, and scorpions. That or shoot BB guns with the neighbor boys next door. Hard pass.

Instead, teenager that I was, I switched on the 300+ channels of cable to see if there was anything good on.

There wasn’t. But I got sucked into watching Britney Spears and Madonna’s latest on MTV anyway until Kurt Loder broke in to report on the unfolding situation in Columbine, Colorado.

American childhood changed forever. 

Far more than 9/11, the Columbine school shooting signaled this new era, defined not by fear of foreign aggression, but of domestic terrorism perpetrated mainly by young, white males with weapons purchased legally at their neighborhood gun store. As much as we wish it weren’t so, school shootings have become a part of American adolescence.

Here in Santa Barbara County, a needless disaster of our own making is unfolding in Goleta. It began, as many contemporary tragedies do, with a simple bureaucratic oversight.

After seeing rent go up by 50 percent, Goodland Guns owner Dan Ashton began searching for a new storefront. The distinct nature of his business precipitated over 150 emails (by his own account) to Goleta city officials, as he searched for a new legally zoned location. Months later, his application to operate in a long-vacant former 7-Eleven on Hollister Avenue got the green light.

I’m not a gun owner nor a gun rights activist. Indeed, if it were up to me, we would throw all the world’s guns in a volcano and be done with it. But as I am not the ruler of the universe (yet), I must admit that Goodland Guns is a long-standing business with a decent track record of safety, as far as guns go, and that it has a right to do business under the law as it is written.

And yet, this seemingly ideal location for a legal business of good standing in a long-vacant eyesore has one itty-bitty issue: It is located next door to Here We Grow preschool.

In an age when school shootings are a regular occurrence, when mass shootings are an expected part of our lives, when American streets frequently and spontaneously become the site of urban guerrilla warfare, the citizens of Goleta are rightly left to wonder how an oversight of this magnitude occurred. And, understandably, they also want to know who is to blame.

Is it the owner of Goodlands Guns who was just trying to find a new location for his business after an exorbitant rent increase?

Is it the city staff who approved the location after fielding a slew of increasingly frustrated emails from a reputable local business owner?

Is it the elected city officials who, amid the myriad of demands on their limited time and resources, failed to proactively notice that their staff had made a simple bureaucratic oversight, albeit with enormous consequences?

If we are to be honest, if we are to be rational, in the system of laws under which we live, there are no villains in this story. Except for all of us.

Twenty-seven years after the first domestic terrorist event that unleashed a torrent of copycats, we — you, me, the lot of us — have allowed those who profit from the death of our children to degrade every level of our government to the point where the safety of our children comes so far down the list of municipal priorities that no one even thought to put into law that a gun shop cannot operate within a square block of a school.

It could have been as simple as that. One block. One sentence. One moment’s consideration. 

But while there are no easily identifiable villains, there are clear heroes to celebrate: The citizens of Goleta who have shown up at City Council meetings demanding that what is done be undone and that preschoolers are not forced to bear the burden of the adults who have been failing them for decades. They have shown us exactly what to do. The rest is up to us.