I heard the somber music and the unrehearsed tones of the commentator on the radio when I went to go to the bank before lunch. It must be very bad, I thought. Then the story spooled out. More than 20 dead, lots of dead children. Shooter dead. I had to turn it off. I played some 40+ year-old music. When I came out to the car from the bank, the commentators were still at it. I turned it off again.
I imagined the horror of the parents on hearing the news without knowing whether their child was dead. I imagined the horror of the adults at the school on seeing the dead children. I imagined the unimaginable horror of the children while they were getting gunned down. I imagined the unthinkable and life-altering conversations that the parents of the surviving children will have with their children who don't actually know what happened.
I tried and failed to imagine how anyone could stand in front of a classroom of eight and nine year-olds and shoot them.
When I got home and read the thoughtless things that people said in the aftermath, I felt sorry. Sorry for us as a civilization that we simply throw up our hands and say that nothing could have prevented this, that this is "not as bad as (fill in the blank)", that a solution is not even worth trying to discuss, let alone implement.
2 comments:
We need to have the balls to say no to the gun lobby, the NRA, those who quote the dammed constitutional amendment and the entire gun economy. It has got to stop. We are not the wild west any more and our right to bear arms meant muskets not automatic machine gun like weapons. I say melt the lot down and make toy cars with the metal.
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