The Elementary School Shooting in Minnesota

 Heartbroken, and terrified, about this elementary school shooting in Minnesota. The two children who died were exactly the age, 10 and 8, of my two elementary grades grandchildren. Like them, they must have been excited to start the first school week, planning the night before what to wear that first day, what lunch to pack, what accessories to attach to their backpack. I try not to imagine what their parents and grandparents are feeling right now, because I can imagine it all too well. I pray no one repeats in their presence the mantra “guns don’t kill people.”  Cars don’t kill people, and we regulate the hell out of them.

The thing is: guns are the weapon of cowards, the weapon of impulse. And especially and most dangerously, the weapon of our time. The weapon of the delusional loner who spends hours in front of violent video games and loses his sense of reality. Violence in our reality-bending age is disassociated from reality. The twenty-year-old who went to the school with murderous intent had a hand gun, a rifle, and a pistol. Could he have attacked seventeen children and killed two if he had only a weapon, like a knife, that required close body to body contact?