Mass Shooting of the Day

I'm getting pretty tired of reading stories like this.

So, today we've had yet another mass shooting. This time at an actual military facility. (What happened to the "good guys with guns?" Somehow they never manage to show up. Even when the Bad Guys with Guns start shooting in places where everybody else is armed.)

What I want to know, as an American citizen, as a voter, as an educated person, and most importantly, as a mom, is when will this society decide that it has had enough of this shit? What will it take for people to realize that the widespread availability of military-grade firearms is one of our biggest public health threats in this country?

And when will people start calling it terrorism? Because if this isn't terrorism then I don't know what the fuck it is. And I'm sick of it.

For months now I've been thinking about the post I want to write about Newtown. All these months later I still have not wrapped my head around that. Like, I would imagine, many other parents in America, I still think about that day all the time. I still remember the crashing panic attack that ensued when I heard the news. The one that lasted a full week.

The events in Newtown, for me, were far more personally traumatizing than 9/11 even began to be. I lived in downtown Boston when the towers came down, but I didn't feel anywhere near as personally threatened on 9/11 as I did on the day when Adam Lanza killed those little children and those teachers -- those warrior women whose names should be remembered forever.

I hope that doesn't sound harsh. Of course I understood the horrible reality of 9/11 and grieved the mass slaughter, in all its incomprehensibility. But that was exactly the point. It was incomprehensible. Terrorist airplane attacks on skyscrapers haven't exactly been a commonplace event. Mass shootings by heavily-armed maniacs happen continually in America.

I don't want this to be the country my kids grow up in. We can do better than this. We HAVE to do better than this.