One Million Five Hundred Sixteen Thousand People

No, my blog title isn't a bad take on the hit Broadway song "Seasons of Love".  It came from something tweeted by singer Bette Midler two days ago:  1,516,173 gun related deaths in the United States since 1968.

 It's been years since I've been in the Texas Hill Country. It's been 45 years since I left Texas.  My spouse and I lived in Texas for eight months while he received technical training from the military.

The Christmas we lived in Texas, we were able to go on vacation and we visited San Antonio, Texas.  It was a wonderful visit.  We also drove through some parts of the Texas Hill Country.  I don't think we traveled through Uvalde, though.

We didn't stay in that part of the United States, though.  Fate eventually brought us to the Southern Tier of New York.  But Texas has stayed in my memory.

It's an interesting place, though, this little city of Uvalve, which lies about a one and a half hour drive from San Antonio.  The "Uvalde County Fun Facts" blog describes the area as follows:

"The Texas Hill Country River Region in Uvalde County is a place of simple pleasures – a land where chalk cliffs surround three crystal-clear rivers and a canopy of Cypress trees casts the perfect blanket of shade from the sunny skies overhead."

Maybe so, but Uvalde will forever be linked to a tragedy that grows more tragic by the minute.  If I had been there last week- let's pretend I was- what would I have said to the grieving people?  I can't even begin to thik of any way I could offer support, except for the not-so-fun fact that I am a member of one of the many United States communities that have suffered mass killings.  So maybe I could have said:

"Our gunman bought the semi automatic pistol he used legally.

So did yours.  And, in fact, the New York Times Sunday Review listed, on its front page, 15 mass shootings where the gunman bought his gun legally.

Ours took the lives of 13 innocents plus it orphaned two children. Yours never should have happened because we should have solved this problem of gun violence many years ago.

We the people failed you, the people of Uvalde, Texas, just as we  failed the people of Buffalo, New York.   And we the people of the United States have failed tens of other communities, too many to name.

All I can tell you, people of Uvalde, is this: one day the news media trucks and reporters will be gone, just as it was for us.  You will be left to mourn in silence, the silence of indifference, as Americans move on to the next tragedy, the next horror.

Because, make no mistake, there will be next tragedies, there will be next horrors, and then, what will we say to those families?"

Those words would not have given any comfort.  But they would have been true words, every one.

A 12 year old girl died in Binghamton in April, thirteen years after that adult classroom shooting in Binghamton, New York, struck by a bullet while she was out walking with her family.  No arrests have been made.  The neighborhood (I know someone who lives in that neighborhood) is crying out for justice.

It isn't the terrible mass shootings that make the national news that are the problem.  It's all the shootings.  And if we don't care about adults, at least we can care about the children impacted each year.  When one person is killed or injured by a gun, entire families suffer.  In the case of a mass shooting (four or more people injured or killed in the same shooting incident) it's an entire community.

At least care about the children.

I guess it takes someone from outside the United States to call out this situation.  A blogger I read had something to say about what is happening here.

On this day after Memorial Day, all I can say is "History will judge us. History will remember.  What will the final judgement be?"