The Glock in the breakroom

I have had to deal with a shooting at a client’s place of business (there are legal and HR responsibilities I never imagined). I have had to have a security guard monitor a client’s foyer in the face of threats. More than once, I had to arrange for a bodyguard to hover at a meeting for fear of violence.

All these unhappy memories flooded back in the wake of the cascade of killing this month has brought. A teenage dance party turns into a slaughterhouse. A visit to a bank becomes life-­threatening. Going to a church-run school is deadly. Ringing a doorbell is fraught with peril. From Bowdoin, Maine, to Waianae, Hawaii, dozens of people have been shot and killed—many in a single weekend. Carnage is too bland a word.
This is no political diatribe, but there was something chilling about celebratory antics at the National Rifle Association convention, at the very same time so many across the country were burying their children and other loved ones whose lives were ended by firearms. There are simply no words to describe properly what goes through the heads of those whose standard response to one mass killing after another is that there’s never a right time to do more than mourn.

The availability of mass murder weapons and the blasé attitude to the carnage they wreak among so many in our political class is a national challenge. When parents send their children to school not knowing if they will be shot dead, we have a problem beyond political dimensions. It’s also a growing trial for every member of our various communities. This has little to do with the Second Amendment. It has everything to do with what we value as a society.