Watching the news while folding laundry and I see the mother of a 14-year-old girl who was killed in her classroom yesterday. The mother is screaming for help. For action. For change.
This mother is going to go home today and take out a load of laundry herself. Because there is always laundry when you have kids. In it will be her daughter’s favorite t-shirt or the skirt she wore last week. They’re not tiny clothes like Jake wears but holding his, I can feel the screaming, raw pain that this mother in Florida feels.
And I think about Sandy Hook and those tiny little bodies, blasted into pieces. And those tiny clothes. The little Iron Man underwear. The t-shirts with the grape jelly stains.
Jake is 4. Jake is 4-years-old. He’s 4 and he knows what to do if there is an active shooter in his school. Four years old.
Don’t get at me about your right to have military grade hardware. Or the need for militias to protect us from tyranny. I don’t care. I don’t want to hear it.
What I want is to not have to think about having to plan my 4-year-old’s funeral. I don’t want to imagine those tiny clothes bloodied and ripped to shreds.
This has to stop. What more do you need to see to understand that this is a problem? That guns do kill people. And some kill a whole lot of people really quickly. Because that’s what they’re designed to do.
And then think about the fact that my 4-year-old has to even know what an active shooter is.
It is time to stop this. Past time. Too many anguished parents, brother, sisters, friends. Just. Stop this.
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