‘Because I don’t want my children to get shot’: why I left America

“Because I don’t want my children to get shot in the face.” I’ve uttered these words countless times since I exiled myself from the United States following the 2016 election. It’s the reply I offer when anyone questions why I left the so-called “greatest country on Earth”.

After the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas last week I am yet again convinced this decision to move my family away from America – where the number one cause of death for children is now guns – was the right one.

Children pray at a memorial site for the victims killed in the elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.Credit: AP

The day after Donald Trump’s election, my wife and I decided to leave the United States despite the fact that we had grown up and spent most of our lives there. As I said at the time, the half of me that wasn’t American was tired of being afraid. I wanted to send my children to school and not wonder if they wouldn’t come home that afternoon.

And even if they did reach adulthood, escaping the culture of mass murder the States now endures, they would have done so experiencing regular active shooter drills in a country governed by people who care so little about children’s lives it protects automatic weapons with greater passion than living beings. I wanted my children to grow up with a sense of their value as human beings, which I no longer believed America could provide them that.

Our first port of call was the United Kingdom. Within three months, my wife, pregnant with our second son, came home and described a deeply moving experience on the bus – she had realised she dropped our first son off at school that morning without any consideration that anything bad could happen to him.

Our greatest fear as parents had become what we call “acts of God”, such as a truck jumping a curb, lightning, a plane falling out of the sky and landing on him. But realistically, the greatest threat to his safety had become trees, because maybe he would fall out of one and break a bone. That was what we, as parents, now worried about when we considered our children – trees.

Last year, my family and I moved to Australia, where my mother was born and I am a citizen. It was an act of coming home for me, but also, finally, accepting that I will be Australian for the rest of my life and, conversely, scared of America for the rest of my life because it seems so impossible that anything could ever change there.

Two days after 19 children and two adults were murdered in Uvalde, Republican leaders are blaming everything but guns – a list that includes mental health, schools with too many doors, and a need for more “good guys with guns” (overlooking the fact that dozens of armed law enforcement took over an hour to eliminate the shooter in Uvalde).

Republicans in the US Senate have already blocked any chance of even debating the subject of new gun control legislation, and on Saturday many, including leaders from Texas and Donald Trump, proudly spoke at the National Rifle Association convention in Houston.

An acquaintance in the States asked on Twitter: “Question for my followers in countries that don’t have school shootings: What security measures do your schools have in place?”

I responded: “I live in Australia ... My kids’ school only has a fence … and a gate that stays open all the time. Why? Because a conservative government here, with the country’s support, acted to put an end to mass shootings.”

This experience isn’t universal in Australia. For example, some of my Jewish friends here live with armed security at their children’s schools. But the reality is, since Port Arthur, no parents have ever again had to bury their children because loose gun regulations allowed a person, for whatever reason, to open fire in schools, shopping malls, or workplaces.

No parent has ever had to stand outside a school screaming pleas for the police to do something, anything, only to get pepper-sprayed in the face. No parent has ever been asked to provide DNA swabs, as they were in Uvalde, to help identify murdered children because the children’s faces were so mangled by bullets from a semi-automatic rifle only recently and conveniently purchased.

“Because I don’t want my children to get shot in the face,” that’s how I answer when people ask me why I moved to Australia. “Because I don’t want my children to get shot in the face.”