Friday, February 22, 2019

One year anniversary of the shootings in Parkland, Florida

It’s been a year since 14 students and three adults were shot and killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. The Miami Herald wanted to know how many children have been killed in the year by gunfire since that day. Their total: 1,157. They ran short stories of each of these victims in the paper February 12.

My opinion: It’s too easy to get a gun and bullets(!) in this country, especially those with a known mental illness or a felony conviction. In many cases, the problem is not a lack of of laws, but lax enforcement. I don’t want to take away the right of law-abiding citizens to own guns; I want small, incremental changes made in the existing laws and better enforcement until the problem is reduced to a level society can live with — and I have no idea what that level is.

[This was originally posted on my Facebook page February 17. The comments from that post are included below.]