Tragedy in the City

What a sad weekend.  Words stick in my hands, unable to be written.  I wish this was more elegant.

If you want elegance, please enjoy some flowers from my garden in 2019.  Happier times!

The rest of this post is a bit grim, so please feel free to admire the flowers on your way out.  But I hope you'll stay.

As my United States readers know, there was a mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, at a supermarket.  13 people shot, 10 dead, the alleged shooter (whose name I will not use) in police custody.  Buffalo is the second largest city in New York State after New York City.  It is also the home town of our current Governor.

The alleged shooter is an 18 year old man from Conklin, New York, which is about 15 miles from where I live near Binghamton, New York. Conklin is a small community of about 5,000 people.

Our community here in the Binghamton area knows about mass shootings.  We have felt the pain that so many communities have felt. 

On April 3, 2009 (as my regular readers know) a mass shooting several blocks from where I used to work in Binghamton took the lives of 13 innocents and the man who killed them.  That shooting convinced me to start this blog.  That shooter lived locally and bought the gun locally (at a sporting goods store now closed).

The school psychologist at Sandy Hook grew up in Vestal, another town in our area.

But these shootings were not like our shooting. Buffalo's pain is not our pain.  Our shooting didn't involve a young man who drove some 200 miles to target members of a Black community.  He picked the only supermarket in the area.  He must have known that, sooner or later, everyone in that community shopped there.

What else are we learning?  This man graduated from high school and was apparently attending our local community college. He also live streamed the shooting (which was taken down  but other sites keep posting it) and published a long manifesto with his beliefs.  He drank from the poison waters of extremist sites.  He came with weapons inscribed with symbols and words of hate.  This was, pure and simple, a crime of hate.

He purchased his Bushmaster semi-automatic weapon locally in the Binghamton area (although it was modified after sale in a way that would not be legal in New York.) The gun shop that sold the gun is now being targeted on social media, and has closed for this week, and I will not name it.

These are some of those he killed.  Reports state he had planned to visit other sites to continue his spree but the Buffalo police came too quickly. It's also reported that he may have also scouted out Rochester another major New York city, for a shooting.

By all accounts, this Buffalo neighborhood is a close knit community, and the residents are coming together in their grief as they now have nowhere to buy food.

Worse yet, this wasn't the only active shooter event in our country this weekend.  It was just the most deadly. There was a church shooting in Laguna Hills, California, also described as a hate crime. That shooting was stopped by a heroic doctor who died. There was a shooting in a flea market in Houston.  There were shootings in several locations in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.  There were other shootings that didn't even make the news.

No community is immune from the poison of hatred or the easy availability of weapons, and we ask ourselves again, "why?" If we aren't minorities who are targets of hate crimes (people of color, Americans of Asian-Pacific origin, various religions) we may live in fear, a fear we don't dare show as we go about our everyday lives. (I say "we" because I am a member of one of those groups).  But make no mistake, everyone in this country is at risk.   Hatred is out of control.  It has become mainstream.

Americans have asked that question of "why" too many times now, in this nation.

How many times is too many?

Or will we offer thoughts and prayers yet again, and then move on, leaving the families and friends of Buffalo, of Laguna Hills, of Winston-Salem, of Houston, of previous sites like El Paso, Pittsburgh, Orlando, and Sacramento...so many other towns and places where hate has surfaced, to pick their lives back up?

This time, what will we choose to do?