This isn't about me. I want to make that very clear that I am not writing this for any sort of anything for myself. But I do have thoughts and opinions, and I find that putting those to words helps me in these situations. And I also have this platform on which to do so.
That's the overwhelming thing I feel when I try to find words for something like the Connecticut shooting that happened today. Anything I can or might say draws attention to myself, and that is simply not fair to those that are living with this. I'm not religious, so I don't have any prayers, and any sense of sadness that I feel is woefully inadequate as I sit here so far removed from the incident.
So I don't want to talk about how awful things like this are, because we all know it. I don't want to say that my thoughts are with the families involved because that seems like a given for any reasonable human being. My response is to begin thinking about solutions. While things like this rip at us emotionally and give us understandable bias, I don't think it's ever too soon to start asking ourselves how we can make things like this as rare as possible.
The "today is not the time to talk about gun control," mentality seems absurd to me. When you have a wound as vicious as what the shooting in Connecticut has produced, you start working on it right fucking now. To not do so is an insult to everyone that died needlessly.
At the same time, I don't want to discuss this in such a vacuum. Guns aren't the only problem when it comes to school shootings. If we're going to pursue effective solutions then we have to consider all the factors. We don't know exactly what happened in Connecticut right now so it's easy to focus on the weapon (which we don't know specifically either). But there are mental health discussions to be had, bullying discussions, safety and security discussions, legal discussions, and many, many others.
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