I live in America, and I am sick, tired, and scared of all the shootings that happen around me as a matter of course.
The ones like you'll read about in tomorrow's paperthe shooting in Marylandare frightening enough. I am fully aware that the chances of this happening to me are very slight, and I try not to be hysterical about it, but it does cross my mind when I go to a crowded movie or talk in front of a large audience of strangers (something required by my job). It's an instinct by this point; just as one example, I was at Jurassic World last week and it was enormously crowded, and there was a moment when I wondered if I had chosen a particularly unsafe seat in case someone came in blazing and clocked my exits, just in case. And I'm deeply saddened by my friends with small children who talk about the mass shooting drills they all do in school and the nursery rhymes they learn to keep quiet if someone's on the loose with a gun.
And it's more than that: it's the everyday violence. I know I'm privileged in this regard, because I worry about crossfire rather than living with this on my immediate doorstep (as is true for so many Americans), but there are so many shootings in every city in America I've lived in. Just this week, in the several towns (not even the cities!) that I've lived in, a person chased another through a local business, firing away, after a disagreement in the parking lot; a teenager got shot walking down the street; a bystander got hit during an argument gone awry; and a person waiting in her car at the grocery store got car-jacked with a gun. This isn't exaggerated, and it isn't even to mention some of the cities that I've lived in where there's an average of more than one gun murder a day (that is an even larger and more systemic series of problems).
I don't mean to give the wrong impression of America, which is a country I love and often gives me a sense of freedom that I never had in the UK. But it's something that I flat-out didn't think about when living in Britain, and it's playing so heavily on my mind here.
This is rather a screed: my apologies. But the shooting today, and the fact that the first victim named is the brother of an author I've long loved (and sort of felt like I know, as you do with those people whose work you know so well), has really shaken me up.
I guess, at my core, that I'm tired. I don't see any change happening here, and there's nothing that I can really do, not as long as money is so wrapped up in politics and people are so wrapped up in their guns. My feeling has always been that if the mass murder of primary school children didn't change people's minds, nothing really would.
So, I guess, AIBU to feel so hopeless about this? And can I just encourage any Americans out there to please, please think about voting for any change in this direction that they can in November? Even if you own a gun yourself, I hope you can see just how sick we are as a country right now.