Bang Bang

"Did you hear about the church in Texas?"

That's what my 17 year old asked me tonight. I replied yes, and also remarked at how sad it is. "A one year old was killed" I said. "And a pregnant lady. One family lost someone from three generations."

He agreed it's awful. We both shook our heads and I said "Something needs to be done" and he said "Yeah."

And that was it.

That's where we are, America. It's happened again. And it will keep happening. I'm not going to go too deep on this right now, for a few reasons.

1. I am nobody in this situation. This tragedy, this crime, didn't affect me or my family or anyone I loved. My opinions on the subject aren't at all important or relevant. After heinous things like this happen, the Bloggers of America tend to voice their feelings via long Facebook posts, open letters to their kids and little jottings just like this. This isn't about how I feel or how I'm supposed to talk to my kids about it. It's about the people who died in a church and the asshole who killed them. 
2. It's late. I've been looking at pictures of the victims and reading about their lives and it's overwhelming (again) when you picture each of them, how they lived and how they died and the wanton waste of it all is too much.
3. We are at a place in this country that is so bad and so divided and so quick to boil over that discussing what happened and why it happened leads to fighting and meanness and I don't want to make these people's deaths a mockery by using them to make a point. Not now. Not here.
4. Honestly, how deep can we go with it? A bunch of innocent folks were killed by a person who shouldn't have had guns. But, he did. 

I am in Minnesota. Hunting and guns are pretty common around here. I, personally, have never even held a gun...I guess there were BB guns at my grandparents' farm when I was little, but I never went out with the cousins and uncles and grandpa to shoot things with them. 

Guns scare me but I have friends who own them and use them responsibly. I don't believe they should be taken away. I think if you go through training and gun safety classes and are of sound mind, go for it. When the kids and I were going through some pretty terrible times, kind people gave us some of their hunting bounty. That venison jerky was a hit with the kids and so was everything else. The people who used their guns to get those deer are good people. Kind people. This isn't about them.

My friend, my bestie, was robbed at gunpoint not once, but twice. She was terrified and rightly so. The persons who pointed a gun at my homie were neither kind nor nice. This is kind of about them. 

Over a million and half people have died by gun-related incidents since 1968. That's more than the number of service people killed in all of the U.S. wars combined. Of course not all of those are mass shootings. Some are accidents. Some are suicides. Some are justified shootings (there's another topic for another day, right?). But some of them are people who were killed by someone who shouldn't have had access to a gun. This is all about them.

I don't know what the answer is. We need to do something, though. Because this is just going to keep happening. And the really horrible thing is, we're getting used to it.



*I've decided to challenge myself and do the NaBloPoMo, National Blog Posting Month, and write a blog post every single day of November. I figure it's the kick in the ass I need to get writing again. I've made this one with about 5 seconds left of November 6th so you can see how well it's going so far. 

Stay tuned. And thank you for being here.