From My Journal: A Culture of Guns and Violence

December 13, 2012: Another Mass Shooting. This time at our own Portland, Oregon Clackamas Town Center. My daughter works at another Portland mall and so this shooting hits home. She shared that her coworkers were extremely fearful and nervous the day after the shooting. The young shooter seems to have led a fairly normal life and yet he walked into a mall with an AR-15 semiautomatic assault rifle and a high capacity gun clip and started randomly firing. More deaths, more injuries, more sorrow.

I'm sure most of us have been to a mall or to a shopping center parking lot. Other mass shootings have occurred at high schools, college campuses, and movie houses. My daughter was in an Eugene elementary school when the Thurston High School shooting in Springfield, Oregon happened. She attends college at Portland State University and has friends at the University of Oregon. We've all been to movie theaters. Certainly each one of us can think of a friend, a relative, an acquaintance who was near or at a mass shooting here in our supposedly safe and sane United States of America.

So what is it going to take for the public to demand more responsible gun laws? Oregon State Senator Ginny Burdich is reintroducing legislation that never made it to the floor in 2011: Banning high capacity gun clips. Isn't this reasonable? And do we need semiautomatic assault rifles in everyday people's hands? We don't have to be anti-guns, only anti unnecessary innocent carnage.

December 14, 2012: I just learned of another mass shooting: 20 children at a Connecticut elementary school were randomly killed. Are we going to allow this senseless violence to continue? Eighteen beautiful children killed!

© 2012