Mass Shootings in America: The Way Forward is Spoken Within

Today, my heart dips into an ocean of sadness. There under the surface, waves crush my heart with an anger that feels finally helpless. Like a blue whale who, even with her great size unchallenged as it is by any other creature in the sea, sees its brethren struck down by spear, human trash, and orca pods; as each technique channeled through her blow hole fails to stop the suffering, and the spiral of chaos closes in, she surrenders, as do I, in disbelief to the fact that we are helpless. The frenzy of chaos, coming from all sides, is, we accept, too great for us to challenge alone.

I know I'm not alone in this sadness and anger. Or else maybe you feel apathetic, or nothing, and that's okay. The decades of horror on our televisions, being not fictionalized nightmares, but rather the evening news, has desensitized us, and it's had to. If we felt the grief of every mass shooting, hate crime, and government sanctioned murder, we'd crumble.

Desensitization is a matter of survival in America.

Eight people dead by what? The mind of a mentally ill individual, or a gun in a human hand?

Maybe this one hits so hard bc it happened in a city I've gallivanted round since childhood: Indianapolis. It's where my best friend lives. She got married there to her soulmate two weekends ago, and the celebration has glued an afterglow of happiness to my disposition so that my peace has gone uninterrupted.

Until today.

I'm grasping to understand why the United States stands alone among the advanced nations of the world in mass shootings. Other developed countries don't have this problem, so it can't just be a 'human nature' thing. We're the only first world country where mass shootings happen so often that our children are growing up in a society where it's normal, and to be expected. This, as it's been for my generation. Just as we were first blinking open our minds to this wonderful world, Columbine happened. We don't know a time when mass shootings didn't hover in our guts, churning fear.

It's April. Only four months into the year. I've been consumed by the bright colors of spring, and the glee of blooming flowers. I regard this time as deeply sacred, and abundant in the way of new beginnings, newborns, and blank canvases.

But today my glee's subdued as I unglue myself from the afterglow and allow myself to feel this one. Because I refuse to accept the senseless slaughter of people who maybe I don't know, but who still, I love. I refuse to respond with shrugged shoulders, or empty expressions that shoo the news away.

When I was five, I spent what felt like months at the time, but it was probably more like weeks, missing my mom from the house of a stranger as she and the adults in our family attended the murder trial of her sister, killed by an emotionally unstable man with a gun.

This inspired me to research and study this topic since I learned how to research. I've done my best to seek out all sides of the argument and to engage with every perspective. I've sought out conversations with advocates for no guns, some guns, and guns for everybody! I've listened and internalized each one. I've mulled over the logic, rationalizations, beliefs, arguments, and experiences shared with me. I've wielded statistics like a swordswoman. I've switched sides. I've been unsure. I've written essays and participated in debates in argument for both sides-- guns good, guns bad.

My mind is flooded with the complexities of this issue of gun control. I've witnessed the tragic repercussions of the gun's wicked power through the eyes of my family. I've benefited from their protection. I'm locked and loaded with the NRAs 2nd amendment defense; I'm eager to support individual rights and freedoms. I'm heartbroken at the anguish of the grieving mother, brother, and friend; I rage that people suffer and die by an out of control instrument of death that we have every ability, as a nation, and as has been exemplified by plenty of others, to live very happily and safely without.

But today, I'm putting that all away. I'm burning the stats and trashing the rationale and the logic and the papers and journals and documentaries and propaganda that twist my thoughts like Odin's knot.

Because, while I'm always game for a well informed and passionate debate, there's nothing, to me, to debate anymore. I don't need history or politicians or tradition or academia to tell me what I knew when I was five; people kill people, but people kill people a lot easier with a gun. People kill people a lot more often with a gun.

Yes, mental illness is a widespread and growing issue in our country.

I wonder if it has anything to do with an entire generation of adults growing up in a society where the most imminent 'enemy' to fear wasn't an otherized group, but the unstable and sick mind of a broken individual, brought up in an unstable society, with legal access to a force that kills by the twitch of a finger and the flash of a bang.

Anyway, we all know what needs to be done. When we allow ourselves to feel the trauma of these murders, our hearts tell us instantly, faster than a bullet could dream of flying, that this constant blood spilling is deeply, deeply wrong.

And it's completely preventable.

Since I was a child, desperately disturbed and confused by the violence of this society I found myself plopped into, I didn't understand why or how anyone would want a gun, or how when I wasn't aloud to hold a butter knife, the grown ups could allow such an obviously deranged and dangerous instrument to not only exist, but to flow freely through the hands of almost anyone who wants one. The grown ups insisted it was more complicated than that and so I grew up learning those complications inside out, thinking that when I became a grown up, I'd be able to help stop the killing.

God, its horrible.

But now, I guess I am a grown up. As are my friends and millions of others who want guns gone. But we feel helpless. Demoralized. Desensitized. In a society that's developed its rhetoric and logic to reign supreme, we've learned anything can be rationalized-- even one of the wickedest of death devices in the hands of a society where mental illness and suicide are taking the minds and lives of more, and more, and more people.

So, I don't know. I'm dumbfounded today that people, that we, are so lost that we even question what should be done about guns. That after so many have died, we repeat the same arguments over and over and over again until we're so exhausted, we give up and hope politicians will do it for us, knowing that they won't.

I'll continue to hold that same vision though, that I held as a child, of a gun-less society. And in the meantime, I'll do my best to be as kind as possible to every person whose path I cross, though I'm sure I'll fail sometimes, it's the one thing I can always do. I can't get rid of guns, but I can help other people feel less like using one.