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Posted
3 minutes ago, FirstTimeCaller said:

Well, eight people in Allen. Five people in Cleveland. Six people in Nashville. Six in Louisville. Five in Colorado Springs. Three in St. Louis. Three in Bend. Four in Greenwood. Seven in Highland Park. Twenty-one in Uvalde. Ten in Buffalo... and that's just quickly scanning a list on Wikipedia of the past year. There's 60 people in Las Vegas that would also like a word... but they can't talk. Neither can the 27 in Sutherland Springs or the 50 in Orlando.

This also doesn't speak to those permanently injured or otherwise scared by the terrorism of mass shootings.

For instance, I didn't count the five year old boy in Allen who wasn't killed, but his parents and brother were. So, it's only three deaths. What's the big deal?
 

oh i agree, no reason to have AR15 style guns at all. BAN THEM. 

 

*But there remains the minor detail of the other 20,000+ annual deaths by handgun. 

 

Posted

at this point, i'm favoring BANNING all guns, AR15, hanguns, hunting rifles, shotguns, lady pistols.  Everything.  No more making or import.  No home raids, but shut down the industry and close all gunshops.  All internet sales will be monitored and websites shut down.  No hunting anymore, go fishing.  The End.

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Posted
7 minutes ago, Make em eat Taco Bell said:

that's exactly NOT what i wrote. Reading comprehension ma dude. 

I saw what you wrote, and I'm glad you agree with me.  But the "yeah, but..." tone of your post is what that the Daily Texan crew will cling to in order to prevent any change.  Yes, there will still be a handgun problem.  No, it should not prevent us from tackling the low-hanging fruit. 

And as I wrote a few pages back, the symbolic message sent by an AR-15 ban would be just as important as the ban itself.

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Posted

In Serbia, where 17 people were killed in two mass shootings last week, the president called for an “almost complete disarmament” and offered one month of amnesty for gun owners to hand over their illegal weapons, according to the NYT. Serbia has the third-highest gun ownership rate in the world, with 39 firearms per 100 people. The US is No. 1 with 121 per 100 people.

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Posted
2 minutes ago, TexArcher said:

 

I seriously doubt it.  It's a whole lot easier to pull a trigger a bunch of times than it is to stab someone or beat him to death with a bat, not least of all because the victims get to defend themselves.  What percentage of these shooters has the stomach for wet work killing, not to mention the balls?  It's very close to 0, I'm pretty sure.

Why am I so sure of that?  Because there are plenty of mentally ill and angry people in England, Japan, and Australia.  But mass killings almost never happen there, where the ill and the angry can't go to their local sporting goods store and buy a weapon of war and a thousand rounds.

There is absolutely no question about the root cause of this problem, or how to fix it.  None.  And everyone pointing in any other direction is a fucking shill for a special interest group.

 

All of this. 

I also think using a firearm makes the killing impersonal and easier to follow through with. 

 

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Posted
59 minutes ago, Make em eat Taco Bell said:

suppose all AR15 style guns are magically banned, how many lives will that save annually? We should do it, but the death by handgun is 90% of all gun deaths right? 

Now do deaths by mass shooting. 

Posted

The Allen TX church where Greg Abbott went to think and pray, hosted a viewing of Denesh DeSouza’s pro Trump work of fiction on the 2020 stolen election, 2000 Mules. This may help outsiders understand the kind of twisted Christian  praxis most of us in Texas have to contend with.

 
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Posted
54 minutes ago, gmr548 said:


I mean, W is ass my dude but if a Governor/President/Ex-President comes in my BBQ joint, that photo is getting signed and going on the wall.

If a certain ex-president comes into my bbq joint, he's not going to be served and would be asked to immediately leave the premises.

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Posted

I'll be honest, if given the choice between:

1. no change

2. banning all firearms

 

I'll choose (2) every day.  The thing is, I think it's unnecessary.  I think common sense reform, including minimum age requirements to purchase firearms or ammunition, multi-day waiting periods to take receipt of a new weapon, legitimate background checks, and bans on high capacity weapons and hardware along with restrictions on maximum firing rate will lead to a significant improvement in loss of life.  But hey, I'm just a liberal fucktard who isn't arguing in good faith, right/

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Posted
8 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

I'll be honest, if given the choice between:

1. no change

2. banning all firearms

 

I'll choose (2) every day.  The thing is, I think it's unnecessary.  I think common sense reform, including minimum age requirements to purchase firearms or ammunition, multi-day waiting periods to take receipt of a new weapon, legitimate background checks, and bans on high capacity weapons and hardware along with restrictions on maximum firing rate will lead to a significant improvement in loss of life.  But hey, I'm just a liberal fucktard who isn't arguing in good faith, right/

It WOULD be unnecessary....except for the fact that the dominant power structure is solidly anchored in the "NO CHANGE!!!" position.  Which will inevitably lead to #2, at some point or another.

I argue (to zero avail, mind you) against position 1 because I am advancing TWO interests: 1) I'm sick of fucking American slaughter, and 2) I'm a life-long gun owner who would like to continue to own/possess firearms to engage in the lawful activities I enjoy (I've been hunting literally since I was a toddler).  If we do the "common sense gun reform" path, we serve both of those interests.  Instead, today we follow path 1 with near-zero deviation, which actually serves NEITHER interest.  Sure, TODAY I get to keep my firearms.  But tomorrow -- some tomorrow -- the fault line will shift and irrevocably lurch to position 2.  It is coming.  Not today or tomorrow, but it's coming.  Demonstrate utter contempt and scorn for the reasonable desires of a majority of Americans (FFS, even FOX FUCKING NEWS POLLING shows over 70% of Americans in favor of multiple pieces of common sense reform), and you're going to get it thrown back in your face eventually.

I hate the gun nut crowd both because they don't give a single fuck about the health and safety of my fellow Americans, AND because their absolutely insane and contemptuous path is going to end up costing me and my family the ability to engage in safe and legal firearms activities.

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Posted
8 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

But hey, I'm just a liberal fucktard who isn't arguing in good faith, right/

Just with so much of this stuff, I have stop and ask myself am I liberal? Hell, I don't feel like it at all. I just feel like the other side is extreme as hell.

I'm a white, married, father, homeowner, gun owner, business owner, truck driver, born and raised in small-town Texas. Went to public school, went to public universities. Hell, I fret over my lawn more than Hank Hill. That should be a bread-and-butter Republican voter. 

But holy hell they are insane. They are just over-the-top irrational.

Posted

So far today I have had a woman who is a skip level to me cry and ultimately have to take time off work.  Another skip level to me is friends with family of security guard that was murdered, but he somehow soldiered through.  

Now a direct peer of mine had to ask our boss to push back or outright cancel a meeting because he lives in Allen and his two kids just showed up at home upset and with questions about why all the extra security, heightened tension at school today (elementary mind you). Our boss obviously respected that and did so.

I mean if simple sensible logical discourse can't be had about this maybe corporate bean counters can start figuring out how much this is costing them in lost productivity since nobody gives a damn about anything but dollars.  

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Posted
2 minutes ago, FirstTimeCaller said:

Just with so much of this stuff, I have stop and ask myself am I liberal? Hell, I don't feel like it at all. I just feel like the other side is extreme as hell.

I don't consider myself a true liberal in the modern sense.  i.e., Bernie was too far left for me.  I am left of center, though, even if we don't account for the perversion of "center"' brought on by the march of the Republican party to fascism.

Posted
1 minute ago, Surly Bevo said:

So far today I have had a woman who is a skip level to me cry and ultimately have to take time off work.  Another skip level to me is friends with family of security guard that was murdered, but he somehow soldiered through.  

Now a direct peer of mine had to ask our boss to push back or outright cancel a meeting because he lives in Allen and his two kids just showed up at home upset and with questions about why all the extra security, heightened tension at school today (elementary mind you). Our boss obviously respected that and did so.

I mean if simple sensible logical discourse can't be had about this maybe corporate bean counters can start figuring out how much this is costing them in lost productivity since nobody gives a damn about anything but dollars.  

I've mentioned that before. The number of dead is what makes the headlines. The numbered injured is FAR greater. Then the number hit with scares you can't see. And then there are things like having to tear down Robb Elementary and rebuild a new school, the cost for increased security guards and features, etc.

A $1,000 rifle is literally causing millions in damage in a matter of minutes. From a monetary standpoint, it's insanity.

Posted

It shouldn't be hard to at minimum put say a 1 year freeze on sales or AR15 style rifles while we decide what else we can do. Start with a temporary freeze on new sales, that's it.  That should be doable.

Posted
18 minutes ago, Longhorn_Fan68 said:

wow. I'm genuinely shocked.

I’m more shocked by the passage of the bill than the massacre in Allen

Posted
57 minutes ago, TexArcher said:

 

I seriously doubt it.  It's a whole lot easier to pull a trigger a bunch of times than it is to stab someone or beat him to death with a bat, not least of all because the victims get to defend themselves.  What percentage of these shooters has the stomach for wet work killing, not to mention the balls?  It's very close to 0, I'm pretty sure.

Why am I so sure of that?  Because there are plenty of mentally ill and angry people in England, Japan, and Australia.  But mass killings almost never happen there, where the ill and the angry can't go to their local sporting goods store and buy a weapon of war and a thousand rounds.

There is absolutely no question about the root cause of this problem, or how to fix it.  None.  And everyone pointing in any other direction is a fucking shill for a special interest group.

We can have a gun problem and a violet extremist problem.  Both things can be true at the same time. The easy access to guns and normalization of fascist views (that advocate violence) exacerbate the lethality of violent extremists. I think it’s a mistake to ignore this connection. 

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Posted
8 minutes ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

We can have a gun problem and a violet extremist problem.  Both things can be true at the same time. The easy access to guns and normalization of fascist views (that advocate violence) exacerbate the lethality of violent extremists. I think it’s a mistake to ignore this connection. 

Oh, I'm not disagreeing at all.

I'm just saying that they're almost all pussies without their guns.  There's a fascist problem in many places in Europe right now, too, and they're not getting shot up like 1.5 times per day.

 

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Posted
35 minutes ago, Seasick Sailor said:

A long way to go, but at least it's a small step in the right direction:

 

Meanwhile, Hertz won’t rent a camaro to anyone under 25 because youths are too irresponsible, could hurt themselves and others, and damage property.

A5251F82-10DE-4E52-B855-AE9D0D887654.jpeg

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Posted
5 minutes ago, Seasick Sailor said:

 

Just a coupla freedom trophies right there!  Put em in the case with all the other ones!  There's still a little room on the Uvalde trophy shelve, if you shuffle things around!

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Posted
7 minutes ago, Seasick Sailor said:

 

It's probably pedantic, but I'm not sure I'd say they "died" in the shooting.

They were murdered. Anything short seems disingenuous.

Posted
1 hour ago, TexArcher said:

 

I seriously doubt it.  It's a whole lot easier to pull a trigger a bunch of times than it is to stab someone or beat him to death with a bat, not least of all because the victims get to defend themselves.  What percentage of these shooters has the stomach for wet work killing, not to mention the balls?  It's very close to 0, I'm pretty sure.

Why am I so sure of that?  Because there are plenty of mentally ill and angry people in England, Japan, and Australia.  But mass killings almost never happen there, where the ill and the angry can't go to their local sporting goods store and buy a weapon of war and a thousand rounds.

There is absolutely no question about the root cause of this problem, or how to fix it.  None.  And everyone pointing in any other direction is a fucking shill for a special interest group.

 

 

 

Posted
1 hour ago, GenXer said:

I’m more shocked by the passage of the bill than the massacre in Allen

Well, nothing has passed yet and it's still very unlikely to pass.

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Posted
14 minutes ago, Patricio Swayze said:

That goes for “christians” too. Everyone of y’all that consider yourself a follower of Christ but does nothing to bring the hideous and hateful bullshit your brothers in Christ foist upon the rest of us, fuck yourself too.

I hesitate to say this, but what the hell:  I think that CAN come down to a matter of prioritizing effort.  For a little while I attended a church in north Austin that was highly focused on helping the homeless in its immediate community.  People were allowed to camp on church grounds, and the church itself was opened daily for them to shower and often get free meals.  It was a serious, committed effort to do God's will.  Did they spend a lot of time reaching beyond their neighborhood to try and change the abhorrent behavior of "prosperity gospel" mega-churches?  No, they didn't.  Did that render the value of the services they provided moot?  No, it didn't.  They were good people doing good deeds.  That was it.

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Posted
1 hour ago, TexArcher said:

Oh, I'm not disagreeing at all.

I'm just saying that they're almost all pussies without their guns.  There's a fascist problem in many places in Europe right now, too, and they're not getting shot up like 1.5 times per day.

 

As I waited at a signal light along a car in the left turn lane, a guy in a truck pulled up very close behind the car and laid on his horn until  the car took off. The aggressive behavior of the guy in the truck made it quite clear that he was packing.

Posted
1 hour ago, Seasick Sailor said:

A long way to go, but at least it's a small step in the right direction:

 

I was there today but just outside the room (not enough space) when it was voted out of committee. Huge cheer. Uvalde families were there and hugging each other and crying. It shouldn't have to be this hard.

Big props to Moms Demand Action. They were out in force today and loud. Created a tunnel that reps had to walk though to get to the House floor. Inside, you could hear them chanting outside the doors.

I could see the bill maybe passing the house. No way it passes the Senate. No way Abbott signs it. But there will at least be a record of how everyone voted.

Posted
28 minutes ago, Satchel said:

As I waited at a signal light along a car in the left turn lane, a guy in a truck pulled up very close behind the car and laid on his horn until  the car took off. The aggressive behavior of the guy in the truck made it quite clear that he was packing.

Was his light green? I don’t own a gun but I’ll use my horn pretty aggressively when someone is sitting motionless at a green light or otherwise impeding the progress of everyone behind them. 

Posted



“You can’t take my money to give others healthcare!”

What about when you need medical help?

“I’ll just declare bankruptcy!”

"I'll start a GoFundMe and ask other people for money."


FIFY

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Posted
13 minutes ago, WhatTheBuck said:

Was his light green? I don’t own a gun but I’ll use my horn pretty aggressively when someone is sitting motionless at a green light or otherwise impeding the progress of everyone behind them. 

A lil beep is all you need though

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Posted
13 minutes ago, WhatTheBuck said:

Was his light green? I don’t own a gun but I’ll use my horn pretty aggressively when someone is sitting motionless at a green light or otherwise impeding the progress of everyone behind them. 

I give a courtesy beep.  If they don’t get off their phone immediately they get the full-on 3 second honk.

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Posted
2 hours ago, GenXer said:

I’m more shocked by the passage of the bill than the massacre in Allen

8 reps voted to move it out of committee (5 against). Don't kid yourself into thinking it's getting passed into law.

Posted
1 minute ago, safe sex said:

A lil beep is all you need though

I’ll start with a couple short toots. If they don’t move, I’ll steadily increase the duration and frequency until it’s a continuous blare. That doesn’t happen often but it has happened. I’ll be more aggressive if I’m coming up behind them from a distance and see they’ve been sitting there at the green light the whole time when they should’ve been long gone by the time I get there. It’s really aggravating if I’m forced to stop because some dipshit is staring at their phone and not paying attention. 

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Posted
1 hour ago, Patricio Swayze said:

Everyone of y’all that consider yourself a follower of Christ but does nothing to bring the

Hey- Jared Patterson is a Christ Follower. I know because it says so in his Twitter bio

Posted

Good read written by a local writer (SA) who is from my hometown of Laredo.
https://time.com/6277931/texas-mall-shooting-children-fears/

Spoiler

When my daughter was a newborn, I read an essay about a toddler who died after a loose brick fell from a building onto her head. Devastatingly random, impossible to parse for meaning. I added loose brick to the litany of ways my baby could die.

The list was ever-expanding. When I sat with her in the bathtub at night as she fed from my breast, I imagined falling asleep, both of us sliding down into the warmth. When I swaddled her and lay her on her back in her bassinet, I imagined her hummingbird heart stopping between one breath and the next. When my husband or I strapped her into the car seat, I imagined being T-boned at an intersection. Struck by a drunk driver. Rammed by an 18-wheeler on the highway. I imagined the car seat sailing beyond the reach of my crushed fingers.

Andrew Lester, Charged in the Shooting of 16-year-old Ralph Yarl, Pleads Not Guilty

Posted 19 Days Ago

Andrew Lester, Charged in the Shooting of 16-year-old Ralph Yarl, Pleads Not Guilty

I know now that these are called intrusive thoughts, and that I was probably suffering from undiagnosed postpartum anxiety. I believe this because I didn’t experience it with my second child, though he was born in the first year of the pandemic and heightened anxiety was arguably more justified. At the time, though, I thought this terror—tucked behind euphoric new love and relentless daily care—was simply what it meant to be a mother, driven by instinct and desire to protect vulnerable offspring from a world where a loose brick, unthinking, unfeeling, could simply fall.

Read More: Ralph Yarl, Kaylin Gillis, and the Consequences of American Fearmongering

And in a way, I was right. To love a child, then entrust them to the world, bit by bit—letting them climb a park structure alone, go to school, an overnight trip—is bittersweet terror, always. Now, more than ever.

In 2020, guns became the leading cause of death for children and teens in the U.S.

Notifications roll across my phone: teens and young adults injured or killed for ringing the wrong doorbell, pulling up at the wrong house, entering the wrong car, and standing in the bullpen during a baseball game. Teens killed or injured in mass shootings at parks and parties celebrating prom and Sweet 16. Five members of a family, including a 9-year-old boy, massacred in their own home by a neighbor whom they asked to stop shooting in his yard because their newborn was trying to sleep. Five calls to the police, and no help came. Then the neighbor reloaded. He ran toward their house, where the husband told his wife to get inside. “He won’t fire at me, I’m a woman,” she said. She was the first to die. Two other women were found lying dead on top of her baby and 2-year-old they were protecting. The children, alive, covered in the women’s blood.

All of this, within the last month.

As I was writing this essay over the weekend, I wondered what would surpass this horror in our collective memory. What would make us forget the young boy picking up his twin brothers, the cheerleader, the 9-year-old, the weight and heat and blood of three women whose final actions were to put their bodies between a bullet and the children they loved?

Read More: A New Guns Ruling Could Make Families Less Safe

I was shopping for a child’s birthday gift at Target when my husband texted: his brother had called from Australia, where my husband is from, to ask if we were OK. My husband said yes; why? My brother-in-law had heard, somehow before we did, of the massacre at Allen Premium Outlets, which left nine dead, including the shooter, and wounded seven more, including children as young as 5—the same age as our daughter. My brother-in-law remembered an outlet mall we’d taken him to on a visit once. He couldn’t remember the name of the small town. It could have been there, he thought. It could have been us.

It’s not the first time our Australian family has called, nearly frantic, worried one or all of us had been shot to death. They called last month when they heard a Texas family had been executed by their neighbor. They called last year when they heard a gunman killed 19 children and 2 teachers at an elementary school near San Antonio, where we live. This was Robb Elementary in Uvalde, where three friends of a friend lost their 9-year-old daughters. How?they ask. How can this keep happening? How can we keep letting it?

In 2021, an estimated 1.6 million firearms were sold in Texas, more than anywhere else in the nation. Gun laws keep loosening and gun deaths keep rising. According to the CDC, Texas’s gun death rate per capita was 15.6 per 100,000 residents in 2021, compared to 10.7 in 2014. More Texans were killed by guns that year than in car accidents. And we’re not even close to the deadliest state in the nation for gun deaths—that’s Mississippi, at 33.9 per 100,000. (Massachusetts is the lowest at 3.4.) According to the Pew Research Center, 48,830 people died of gun violence in the U.S. in 2021, more than any other year on record. So far this year, the Gun Violence Archive reports, 14,711 people have died of gun violence in the U.S., with 202 mass shootings and counting.

An incomplete list of where I’ve imagined my children being shot to death:

Their classrooms, bodies splayed on foam mats beneath laminated handprint ducklings

Target, where I always remind myself of entrances and exits, the aisle with laundry hampers where I could hide them

A restaurant, where I imagine that we might be able to tip a table over, use it as a shield, but so many tables are fixed in place, and if wood could protect us, people wouldn’t get shot through doors

A movie theater, the kind my parents took us to every week as a kids, one of our most beloved family outings but where now I think: sitting ducks

Parades, which we don’t go to anyway, so maybe I can cross this one off the list, for now

Later: prom, parties, bars, college, office buildings, banks, hospitals, convenience stores, any place people gather in the course of their beautiful, ordinary lives

Are these intrusive thoughts? Or are they simply thoughts, fearful but reasonable, considering we live in America?

The night of the Allen Premium Outlets shooting, I comb Twitter for updates. Videos are circulating. One, from the dashcam of a car leaving the parking lot, shows the shooter emerging from a silver sedan and opening fire. A jacked-up pickup peels out of its parking space, veering away. The comments are on fire with people saying the driver should have turned toward the shooter, mowed him down. Everyone thinks they’d be a hero in this situation.

Another video, graphic. I know what I’m about to see, but I watch anyway. I don’t know why. To bear witness, maybe. That feels important. When my husband walks into the bedroom, I tell him I watched the video. “Oh, baby,” he says. “Oh, no. Everyone on Reddit is saying to avoid Twitter. I was going to tell you—there’s a kid—did you see the kid?” I nod and he holds me as I sob.

People pray at a memorial next to the Allen Premium Outlets in Allen, Texas, on May 7, 2023.

Joe Raedle—Getty Images

The next morning, I take our kids to a birthday party. A massive indoor playground, their faces wild with joy. They spin on foam teacups, jump on trampolines, scramble through netted tunnels, fly down a slide. I laugh and wave, help my toddler when he needs it, give him space when he doesn’t.

There is always a tension between what we know about the world and what our kids know. My kids don’t know our worry—no, our terror. They know school and birthday parties and picking flowers and “Can I get a toy?” They don’t know about guns, not really. They don’t know people kill each other. They don’t know adults kill children. My daughter doesn’t know that in three years, when she’s in third grade, a proposed Texas bill would require her to learn to use bleeding control stations to stop a bleed during school shootings. (Currently, state law only—“only”—requires seventh graders and above to know how to use these stations.)

Read More: ‘We Won’t Let These Babies Be Forgotten.’ Close-Knit Uvalde Community Grieves After Elementary School Shooting

At the party, our children play and we mothers talk. One tells us about the new bulletproof glass installed at her child’s school. Another says her kids have never been to a mall. Most of us grew up in houses with guns. Most of our husbands own guns. We don’t feel safe. None of us feel safe. None of us feel free. We make ourselves numb, stop looking at the news, draw our lines in the sand and make our concessions to normalcy, and we pretend that every step into a public space in America isn’t a leap of faith.

After the party, once the kids are full of cake and ice cream and my toddler is down for his nap, I look for updates on the Allen shooting. There’s an interview with a witness who arrived at the victims before the first responders. He describes seeing a girl—not a woman, a girl—crouched down, covering her head in the bushes. He felt for a pulse, turned her around, and “she had no face.” He describes finding a child beneath the body of his dead mother, whose blood soaked him head to toe. I can’t believe this is the second time in nine days I’m reading this description.

Sometimes I wonder what wars we wouldn’twage if another country were murdering nearly 50,000 Americans a year. But the bloodshed comes from within our borders, so we let it. We are a snake eating its own tail. We unlock our jaw and open wide.

 

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Posted
Good read written by a local writer (SA) who is from my hometown of Laredo.
https://time.com/6277931/texas-mall-shooting-children-fears/
Spoiler

When my daughter was a newborn, I read an essay about a toddler who died after a loose brick fell from a building onto her head. Devastatingly random, impossible to parse for meaning. I added loose brick to the litany of ways my baby could die.
The list was ever-expanding. When I sat with her in the bathtub at night as she fed from my breast, I imagined falling asleep, both of us sliding down into the warmth. When I swaddled her and lay her on her back in her bassinet, I imagined her hummingbird heart stopping between one breath and the next. When my husband or I strapped her into the car seat, I imagined being T-boned at an intersection. Struck by a drunk driver. Rammed by an 18-wheeler on the highway. I imagined the car seat sailing beyond the reach of my crushed fingers.
Andrew Lester, Charged in the Shooting of 16-year-old Ralph Yarl, Pleads Not Guilty
Posted 19 Days Ago
Andrew Lester, Charged in the Shooting of 16-year-old Ralph Yarl, Pleads Not Guilty
I know now that these are called intrusive thoughts, and that I was probably suffering from undiagnosed postpartum anxiety. I believe this because I didn’t experience it with my second child, though he was born in the first year of the pandemic and heightened anxiety was arguably more justified. At the time, though, I thought this terror—tucked behind euphoric new love and relentless daily care—was simply what it meant to be a mother, driven by instinct and desire to protect vulnerable offspring from a world where a loose brick, unthinking, unfeeling, could simply fall.
Read More: Ralph Yarl, Kaylin Gillis, and the Consequences of American Fearmongering
And in a way, I was right. To love a child, then entrust them to the world, bit by bit—letting them climb a park structure alone, go to school, an overnight trip—is bittersweet terror, always. Now, more than ever.
In 2020, guns became the leading cause of death for children and teens in the U.S.
Notifications roll across my phone: teens and young adults injured or killed for ringing the wrong doorbell, pulling up at the wrong house, entering the wrong car, and standing in the bullpen during a baseball game. Teens killed or injured in mass shootings at parks and parties celebrating prom and Sweet 16. Five members of a family, including a 9-year-old boy, massacred in their own home by a neighbor whom they asked to stop shooting in his yard because their newborn was trying to sleep. Five calls to the police, and no help came. Then the neighbor reloaded. He ran toward their house, where the husband told his wife to get inside. “He won’t fire at me, I’m a woman,” she said. She was the first to die. Two other women were found lying dead on top of her baby and 2-year-old they were protecting. The children, alive, covered in the women’s blood.
All of this, within the last month.
As I was writing this essay over the weekend, I wondered what would surpass this horror in our collective memory. What would make us forget the young boy picking up his twin brothers, the cheerleader, the 9-year-old, the weight and heat and blood of three women whose final actions were to put their bodies between a bullet and the children they loved?
Read More: A New Guns Ruling Could Make Families Less Safe
I was shopping for a child’s birthday gift at Target when my husband texted: his brother had called from Australia, where my husband is from, to ask if we were OK. My husband said yes; why? My brother-in-law had heard, somehow before we did, of the massacre at Allen Premium Outlets, which left nine dead, including the shooter, and wounded seven more, including children as young as 5—the same age as our daughter. My brother-in-law remembered an outlet mall we’d taken him to on a visit once. He couldn’t remember the name of the small town. It could have been there, he thought. It could have been us.
It’s not the first time our Australian family has called, nearly frantic, worried one or all of us had been shot to death. They called last month when they heard a Texas family had been executed by their neighbor. They called last year when they heard a gunman killed 19 children and 2 teachers at an elementary school near San Antonio, where we live. This was Robb Elementary in Uvalde, where three friends of a friend lost their 9-year-old daughters. How?they ask. How can this keep happening? How can we keep letting it?
In 2021, an estimated 1.6 million firearms were sold in Texas, more than anywhere else in the nation. Gun laws keep loosening and gun deaths keep rising. According to the CDC, Texas’s gun death rate per capita was 15.6 per 100,000 residents in 2021, compared to 10.7 in 2014. More Texans were killed by guns that year than in car accidents. And we’re not even close to the deadliest state in the nation for gun deaths—that’s Mississippi, at 33.9 per 100,000. (Massachusetts is the lowest at 3.4.) According to the Pew Research Center, 48,830 people died of gun violence in the U.S. in 2021, more than any other year on record. So far this year, the Gun Violence Archive reports, 14,711 people have died of gun violence in the U.S., with 202 mass shootings and counting.
An incomplete list of where I’ve imagined my children being shot to death:
Their classrooms, bodies splayed on foam mats beneath laminated handprint ducklings
Target, where I always remind myself of entrances and exits, the aisle with laundry hampers where I could hide them
A restaurant, where I imagine that we might be able to tip a table over, use it as a shield, but so many tables are fixed in place, and if wood could protect us, people wouldn’t get shot through doors
A movie theater, the kind my parents took us to every week as a kids, one of our most beloved family outings but where now I think: sitting ducks
Parades, which we don’t go to anyway, so maybe I can cross this one off the list, for now
Later: prom, parties, bars, college, office buildings, banks, hospitals, convenience stores, any place people gather in the course of their beautiful, ordinary lives
Are these intrusive thoughts? Or are they simply thoughts, fearful but reasonable, considering we live in America?
The night of the Allen Premium Outlets shooting, I comb Twitter for updates. Videos are circulating. One, from the dashcam of a car leaving the parking lot, shows the shooter emerging from a silver sedan and opening fire. A jacked-up pickup peels out of its parking space, veering away. The comments are on fire with people saying the driver should have turned toward the shooter, mowed him down. Everyone thinks they’d be a hero in this situation.
Another video, graphic. I know what I’m about to see, but I watch anyway. I don’t know why. To bear witness, maybe. That feels important. When my husband walks into the bedroom, I tell him I watched the video. “Oh, baby,” he says. “Oh, no. Everyone on Reddit is saying to avoid Twitter. I was going to tell you—there’s a kid—did you see the kid?” I nod and he holds me as I sob.
People pray at a memorial next to the Allen Premium Outlets in Allen, Texas, on May 7, 2023.
Joe Raedle—Getty Images
The next morning, I take our kids to a birthday party. A massive indoor playground, their faces wild with joy. They spin on foam teacups, jump on trampolines, scramble through netted tunnels, fly down a slide. I laugh and wave, help my toddler when he needs it, give him space when he doesn’t.
There is always a tension between what we know about the world and what our kids know. My kids don’t know our worry—no, our terror. They know school and birthday parties and picking flowers and “Can I get a toy?” They don’t know about guns, not really. They don’t know people kill each other. They don’t know adults kill children. My daughter doesn’t know that in three years, when she’s in third grade, a proposed Texas bill would require her to learn to use bleeding control stations to stop a bleed during school shootings. (Currently, state law only—“only”—requires seventh graders and above to know how to use these stations.)
Read More: ‘We Won’t Let These Babies Be Forgotten.’ Close-Knit Uvalde Community Grieves After Elementary School Shooting
At the party, our children play and we mothers talk. One tells us about the new bulletproof glass installed at her child’s school. Another says her kids have never been to a mall. Most of us grew up in houses with guns. Most of our husbands own guns. We don’t feel safe. None of us feel safe. None of us feel free. We make ourselves numb, stop looking at the news, draw our lines in the sand and make our concessions to normalcy, and we pretend that every step into a public space in America isn’t a leap of faith.
After the party, once the kids are full of cake and ice cream and my toddler is down for his nap, I look for updates on the Allen shooting. There’s an interview with a witness who arrived at the victims before the first responders. He describes seeing a girl—not a woman, a girl—crouched down, covering her head in the bushes. He felt for a pulse, turned her around, and “she had no face.” He describes finding a child beneath the body of his dead mother, whose blood soaked him head to toe. I can’t believe this is the second time in nine days I’m reading this description.
Sometimes I wonder what wars we wouldn’twage if another country were murdering nearly 50,000 Americans a year. But the bloodshed comes from within our borders, so we let it. We are a snake eating its own tail. We unlock our jaw and open wide.

 


And….we have leadership that wants MORE OF IT.

Our country is beyond redemption, beyond saving. Any country that accepts the literal slaughter of its children is.
Guns are the leading cause of death for American children.
Guns are the leading cause of death for American children.
Guns are the leading cause of death for American children.
Guns are the leading cause of death for American children.
Guns are the leading cause of death for American children.

And we accept and embrace it. We say we don’t. But our policies speak the truth.
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