America, oh America how did it all go so wrong? Again and again simple tasks of living turn deadly – a trip to the grocery store, an afternoon at the spa, a trip to the gas station. Schools – all grades – teachers and students, houses of worship, bars, nightclubs, streets, parks, and almost anyplace you go to work. Newsrooms, airports, concerts, and theaters. Dallas, Orlando, Atlanta, Boulder, Parkland, Newtown, Santa Fe, Annapolis, Las Vegas, Pittsburgh, Miami, Thousand Oaks, Virginia Beach, Gilroy, El Paso, Dayton, Midland, Odessa, Springfield, Charleston, San Bernardino, Aurora, Sutherland Springs, and Ft. Lauderdale-Hollywood. These are only the most recent mass shootings in the last decade… if you go back twenty years the list gets depressingly longer and touches almost every state, city, and town – it will make your head spin and your heart break.

Nothing really changes except the names and locations – nothing gets done. The dead are buried and the families will be left to grieve and search for answers. New, yet unknown names wait to be added to the list – new people, upcoming events, at schools, workplaces, venues, states, cities, and God knows where else. Maybe my next trip to Starbucks will be my last, or maybe someone in my family, one of my friends, a distant relative, or a former co-worker will be in the wrong place at the wrong time – getting some ice cream, a burger, maybe dinner with the family or stopping for gas – just going about living life and then it ends in the flash of a second, the second it takes for someone with a gun to destroy a family, a community, a team, a school, a nation.

Stop. Just stop it. Stop all of this senseless murdering. Stop allowing the few to dictate to the rest of us when and how we will die just so they can own any weapon they want. We have a right to live with our families in peace and without fear.

It can’t be this hard, can it? The Founding Fathers only knew of single shot muskets and pistols when they wrote that Amendment that holds us hostage to this day. Could they ever have imagined a future with machine guns, high-capacity magazines, and an unchecked populace dying to buy them? And yet the debate continues tonight as it will a thousand tonight’s from now about whether or not we should ban war weapons from the hands of the unstable, the mean, the evil amongst us.

Peace and much love to you all as we once again grieve here in America.