Today I’m feeling real anger about the most recent school shooting in Parkland, FL, and about our inability as a culture to act like adults for a change and enact sensible gun control legislation.
Looking at the faces of those teenagers who lived through the event, who stepped over the bodies of people they knew as they were rushed out with their hands above their heads like criminals by police who looked like Robocops into a swirl of smoke and fear just broke something inside of me. I sat and sobbed as I listened to them tell their stories. I couldn’t take my eyes off their faces. And I cannot imagine the pain the families of the deceased are enduring even as I write this. I can’t imagine my daughter dying that way, at the hands of another broken nut case who can’t cope and wants to destroy life as violently as he can.
I wonder where all the normal gun owners are now and why they are not organizing to stop the sale of assault weapons. Don’t they understand that their own reputation gets worse with each senseless shooting?
70% of Americans do not own guns, nor feel the need, and are getting really really fed up with this blind all-or-nothing thinking when it comes to the 2nd Amendment.
My father owned guns and taught us how to shoot when I was growing up. My former husband owned guns and was raised as a hunter by his father. My compadre brother-in-law owns guns as a hunter. These are all good people who are responsible with their weaponry, so I’m assuming that most people who own guns are similar.
I just wish they would organize and break the grip of the NRA, which is a corrupt organization of zealots who stand by and rationalize the deaths of innocent teenagers who happened to be in the wrong place (school) at the wrong time (during the school day).
I accept the fact that the price of freedom may be random violence because in a nation of rebels, some will always take it to the extreme.
But this steady cadence of gun violence unleashed on the most vulnerable is not normal. It is obscene and we should no longer tolerate it.
Don’t believe me? Just look carefully at the faces of those kids who literally recorded the sounds and the chaos of a shooting event so that they could share it with the rest of us so that we’d do something about it.
Look at their eyes. See what this did to them. And now imagine that they were your children. How would you feel that you could not protect them?
And as for me, in my anger and frustration I write and plan the acts of kindness I’ll do today to anchor more peace into my country that so badly needs it.