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After the Aurora theater shooting, it was hard to get our kids (who were much younger then) to go to the movies. They just didn't want to go, even though I explained that in New York, people couldn't walk around with those giant guns. Even today when we do go, we watch the doors.
Years before, in Florida, a federal agent got into a road rage incident with another man and they pulled into the parking lot of our local post office to argue. The man shot the agent, in front of the agent's teen daughter. The kids quit going with me to the post office.
Our kids grew up having to do those drills where we gamed out where to meet if there was a mass shooting at their school. They've had cellphones since age 12 so we could reach them just in case; and I memorized their daily school outfits-just in case-and we lived in the suburbs.
They're big people now, but that stuff doesn't go away. Our middle guy was working his Broadway job when that car backfired last night and people thought it was a shooting. The family group text fired up & I needed to talk to all three of them -- not text, talk. Just to be sure.
We are raising generations of gun-traumatized American kids, for whom mass shootings are part of life. Hell, I used to get nightmares from the nuclear drills we had at school as a kid in Colorado when we were told we were 50 miles from ground zero and would likely be vaporized...
But these kids have a much higher likelihood of actually dying, at a Walmart, in a movie theater, in a club, at a concert, in church, or even at school. We are letting our kids live in a Hell of fear, just so some dumb lobby can gwok money into their pockets without conscience.
Anybody else sick of having our kids live like this? Sandy Hook babies, Mother Emanuel grandmas, Parkland teenagers, Orlando young people just being happy and free; Vegas concertgoers and now El Paso Walmart shoppers and Dayton clubgoers and on and on ... and we're afraid again.
The gun lobby is doing this to us, full stop. They'll trade our fear for profit any day. But now it's so much worse because the fear is being driven from our own White House! The president used to try and fight the gun lobby & comfort us. Now, the president is the source of fear.
And his party refuses to lift a finger.
