Our final step into abject insanity on this subject was Sandy Hook. After we decided we're ok with classrooms full of dead five year olds, there was nothing else to even talk about.
Business as usual. Just offer 'thoughts and prayers', throw out a few tired old canards about mental health and restart the clock.
I read that article online that challenged people, no matter where they sit on the issue, to sit and read the autopsy reports from Vegas and Sandy Hook. Honestly, I don’t have words at all to describe my feelings. All I feel is just a total sense of anguish, guilt, and shame.
To be clear, I’ve always been for gun control, even before these incidents. I guess I thought that was enough. I didn’t need to know more about these guns beyond seeing body counts and survivor stories. I didn’t need to know more to know they were destructive.
But reading the autopsy reports? Swear to God... I didn’t know. I genuinely, honestly, didn’t know. I didn’t know what those bullets did to those sweet babies and how they were mangled. I didn’t know what happened in Vegas or what those injuries were like. I thought with the former it was close distance and the later it was the volume of shots fired and the concentration of people... I didn’t know what kind of damage these bullets were doing to people and from how far away, and how it was complete and total carnage comparable to the front lines of a war in close range incidents like CT and Orlando.
Reading those reports and understanding the scope of the brutality... It has changed me. I’m deeply, deeply humbled, ashamed, embarrassed, buried in guilt for not realizing what these guns do and just now brutal they are. I feel convicted, deeply convicted, to start trying to make a tangible difference in this issue... Especially as, in our state, they are trying to enact legislation that would penalize schools financially and otherwise for PREVENTING guns presence on school property and school events.
Honestly, the whole thing makes me want to vomit.
