How long must the story be replayed?
We’ve heard it before. We’ve seen it before. We’ll see it again. The names Highland Park, Uvalde, Buffalo, Las Vegas, Margery Stoneman Douglas mark only a handful of places where blood has been spilled, lives taken, survivors struggling and America temporarily grieving.
We know the sequence: the police reports, the eyewitness stories, the names, the victim photos, the floral tributes, the funerals. The cries for gun control, the politicians citing the Second Amendment, the voices saying it can’t happen here; we’re not like that. The questions about the shooters: Did they have accomplices, were they terrorists, where did they get their weapons, why did nobody read their screeds? Where were their parents, siblings and neighbors?
What will we do? Continue to watch horrific scenes on television, read stories about victims and heroes, watch the flowers fade and die. We butt our heads against the Constitution: written by men whose weapons were muskets and pistols, who could never have conceived of an AK-47, who called for “a well-regulated militia.”
We’ll live through this again. I pray it’s not my community, my loved ones. I don’t wish it on any community. But it will happen again and again.