Another Day, Another Tragedy

This morning I woke up groggy and even snoozed my radio for a few minutes, which I rarely do.  Normally it takes music and two separate alarms (snoozed multiple times) to get me moving.  It's bad, but it's all I can muster most motnings.  I'd been up in the night because Carter wet the bed, and it's Monday, which is never a good feeling.  I figured snoozing my radio would give me a few more minutes of real sleep, but even when it came back on and I tried to hop on my phone to wake up, I was still nodding off as I checked my email.  That is, until the radio DJ wished listeners a good morning, but then added something like, "at least as good as it could be given the news out of Las Vegas."  He refused to mention a single detail as he was clearly upset and apparently didn't want to rehash whatever he'd probably already been talking about for a couple hours.  Immediately I opened up my browser and headed to a news site, where the headline was at least as bad as I'd feared.  Fifty dead and 200 injured in a shooting near Mandalay Bay.  In the hours since, nine have been added to the death total, and more than 300 have been added to the injury count.  Horrific.

Not much is known about the shooter as I type.  He was retired but pretty well-off, he lived nearby, and he had a girlfriend.  He had one minor citation, but no other history with the law...though his dad was another story.  His family is currently stunned and confused.  But the fact remains that he had at least 10 weapons with him when he started shooting from the Mandalay Bay tower facing a country music festival across the street, so clearly this was quite the plan.  No one knows at the moment what he was upset about, or whether he had a mental health issue--diagnosed or not.  But he killed a lot of people, including himself, and the world will never be the same for so many people.  It's now the largest mass shooting in U.S. history, though I fear it won't stay that way forever.

I have a hard time knowing that my kids will grow up in a world where this is the norm.  I don't think I really knew anything about a mass shooting until Columbine happened while I was in college.  I still remember sitting in my junior year dorm room watching our usual lineup of afternoon TV when the news brief came on.  We were stunned.  We were only a few years out of high school ourselves, so it hit pretty close to home.  But it was such an unheard-of thing.  I mean, there was a stabbing in my high school a couple years before I got there, but it was one isolated incident of jealous rage between two people.  But a mass shooting?  How? 

Now it's far too common, and incidents just in the years since Columbine have touched all age ranges and numerous workplaces and social settings.  Some of it is at the hands of typical terrorists, and some has been at the hands of the mentally ill.  I still maintain that more needs to be done to take all assault rifles out of the hands of ordinary citizens.  There is no need for them, and if anyone insists they have the right to use one to shoot for fun, all I can say is that their fun is not more important than the dozens of lives those types of guns take.  Just like recreational drugs were outlawed because of their danger to society (even though people very much enjoyed using them), so should assault weapons be because of their danger to society.  Society still has a lot to do with the mental health aspect of it, because you know, guns don't kill people, people kill people...but the less guns there are to get, the smaller the chance of something like this happening again.  Wishful thinking maybe, but it's worth a shot at this point, no?

I think the hardest part of this one for me is that it could have been us.  Remember how we were supposed to go to Vegas in the spring?  Not that we would have been at this specific event or anything, but who's to say it couldn't have been something else?  Heck, we were at a large outdoor event like that here a couple weeks back when we went to the Fringe Festival, and it's entirely possible someone could have shot at us from one of the many buildings bordering the site.  But even more than that, I think about the parents just like us, the couples that just wanted to take a special trip or have a special night out to get a little break from their kids and reconnect as husband and wife.  How many of them are never going to go home or kiss their kids goodnight?  Or how many survived only to have their lives drastically changed forever?  It's easy to think that something like that could never happen to us, but I guarantee 99% of the people involved in incidents like these never thought for a moment it would happen to them.  Why couldn't it be us?  And in this day and age, it seems more likely than ever.

I feel like I've done so many of these posts, but these things keep happening and it never seems to get easier to handle.  It never makes any more sense than it did before, and yet nothing ever seems to change to ensure it won't happen again.  I can't say I have any faith in the current administration to make it happen, but eventually one of these will hit close enough to home to the right person and even the toughest lobbyist will be no match for their determination.  It may not be in time for my generation, but I pray it is for my kids'.  In the meantime...pray, pray, pray.