Mass shooting? What mass shooting? You're probably immediately telling yourself you've never survived a mass shooting. You've never been anywhere near one, right?
That makes you a survivor. Others died, got injured. Not you. You can't plead ignorance of them happening all over these days, indiscriminately in shopping centers, churches, schools, even on the street or "those" neighborhoods. None of those people "earned" getting shot, killed. That's what makes them so unpredictable, that none of the targets knew they would likely get shot, there, then. There were no reasons. The only thing we keep hearing is the shooter must have been mentally ill. Angry. But not at you, surely. You haven't done anything that you can recall to ever make anybody want to shoot you. So those shooters must all have been crazy, right?
The shootings get plastered all over the news, the younger the victims, the more deaths, the more you hear about them. All those days of funerals, of flowers and balloons and teddy bears laid just outside the location where each one happened, the cluck-clucking at the senselessness of it all, the wonderful people among the dead, the tears, the faces in shock, people hugging each other. Each one is brought into your living rooms in as much detail as possible, now even via video feeds of the actual events in "living color". How ironic, eh?
Short of cutting yourself off from the news, you can't avoid being aware, being practically there, hour after hour, incident after incident. But you're sitting somewhere right now, reading this. You're a survivor. So far.
Unless you are completely numb to what's happening, it has to begin to creep in on your awareness that some time in the future it could be your pictures splashed across TV screens, your experience detailed in horrific perfection. What is safe any more? It used to be easy to think that if you didn't go near schools it wasn't going to be you, just relax. It you didn't go to one of "those" centers of worship, one of "those" neighborhoods, it would never be you. If you "behaved" and didn't make anybody angry, it was never going to be you. But the people who do the shootings, everybody seems to agree, are crazy. Unbalanced. Angry and out for revenge, redress of wrongs real or imagined. Looking for a spectacular suicide. Looking for their name to be recognized.
How can you tell just who they are? Is it that grumpy young guy in the check-out line ahead of or behind you? That person you snubbed because you just didn't like then? Have time for them? The person you never even noticed because you were busy? Or just never noticed because they weren't noticeable? Yet.
You're not actually worrying about getting involved in a mass shooting, are you? Those things happen to others, not you. The odds are it'll never happen to you, to yours, to anybody you've ever met or heard of. Unless, of course, you have kids in schools these days, kids getting training in active shooter drills. Do they come home scared? Upset? Have nightmares? Kids can't figure the odds the way that adults can, so a couple words of reassurance from a loving parent might not be enough to set any fears at ease. After all, everything they get taught in school is important, right? That's what you've been trying to impress on them to get them to study. How do you tell your child that active shooter drills aren't important when they might be the very last thing that actually is? How do you tell yourselves that?
Do you try to shelter your children from the details of each last (for now) mass shooting? Have they heard how one young girl smeared the blood from her dead friend all over herself so the shooter would think his job was done the next time he looked in her direction? Is that what you need to teach your kids about their safety? Do you need to tell them that sometimes the cops don't actually react promptly to a shooting so kids and teachers can bleed out while waiting? Does the possibility of their being involved in a shooting influence your decision as to how old is old enough for their own cell phone?
Have you felt you needed to worry about whether your own child could ever become a mass shooter? Is there a problem now your imagination pins that possibility on? Is there something that you're not doing? Doing too much of? Are you even having to worry about which would be absolutely the worst: that your kid is a shooter? Or a victim of one?
So far you've all survived. How long will that last? Can anything be done? Or are we simply at war now, undeclared, ubiquitous, unpreventable? Because surely, not even now, after everything, will we ever consider banning guns from certain people including the under-aged, from domestic abusers, from however we believe we can pick out the people who shouldn't ever be within 50 feet of a weapon. Surely, after everything, we still will never consider banning automatic and semiautomatic weapons, large capacity clips. Because too many people are getting paid generous amounts, whatever amount it takes, for them to never consider the one thing which can reduce mass shootings, the one thing that makes them possible, the single predictor of how it can happen.
Are we still deciding we can live with that?
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