Ten years ago I wrote a post that was strangely prescient, a post about guns early the morning of the Sandy Hook shooting, before that tragedy had happened.
In the post, I told the story of a shopping expedition the night before and how it was difficult to find anyone to help me in the large sporting goods store — difficult until I wandered into the firearms department.
You can analyze it any way you will. You can pin it on our frontier mentality, on the myth of rugged individualism with which our nation has become entangled. You can bring politics in there too, although ten years ago we weren’t as polarized as we are now.
But no matter how you attempt to explain it, there are 20 six- and seven-year-olds who never went home that horrible day, who never grew up, graduated from high school and got their first jobs. Families shattered, lives upended.
We’ve endured legions of school shootings and other massacres since then, including Uvalde, where almost as many children lost their lives as at Sandy Hook. Ten years later, the tears that have fallen could fill another ocean. But still we do nothing.
