One man. One person, two weapons. That's all it took. That's all it took to take too many souls from this earth. That's all it took to rattle a nation. That's all it took to open up yet another conversation about shootings and gun control and thoughts and prayers that almost ceased to exist after less than three days. Because we aren't surprised anymore, the shells of the bullets lying on the ground after mass shootings fail to shell-shock us anymore. A mass shooting is defined as four or more people shot, normally five including the shooter, but I don't think we should count the shooter. I don't think we should give any recognition to anybody who guns down souls who shouldn't yet be gone. Our President has addressed the nation six times in 2016 alone about mass shootings. And sure, "guns don't kill people, people kill people," but people with guns are killing seven children and teens daily. People with guns make it possible for one in eight mass shootings to take place in our schools, where instead of going to learn, our children are going to die. People with guns make the next number impossible to choose between because nine were killed in both the Charleston church and at the Umpqua Community College.
It takes me ten minutes in between each number to come up with something to say. 49 is too many. Why do I have to write so many?
The shooting in Orlando was the worst domestic terror attack since September eleven. It took place at a gay bar on June the twelfth, but by the thirteenth our trending topics have fled away from Orlando, as if tragedy is only relevant when there's a hashtag for it. We've sent our prayers, we are done. We thought we were done. We thought that on the 26th of June 2015, (the day gay marriage was legalized, only fourteen days away on the night of the shooting), we thought we were done. We thought we had reached equality. But when nearly 50 people are gunned down in a gay bar, you question if equality was truly reached on that day. And when mass shootings need to be specified from regular shootings, you question if this is how it is going to be, or if we will take a stand. Because the nightclub shooting was one of fifteen mass shootings in Florida alone in two thousand sixteen, which is unsurprising because it has had almost as many shootings as days. And at the rate we are going, we can't "only hope and pray" that two thousand seventeen will be better, because when our shootings to date are three figures, you realizing that hoping and praying isn't making a change. You can buy a handgun at eighteen before you can legally drink. Your brain isn't fully developed yet, but here, have a handgun. It doesn't matter. We see it in pop culture, movies and books like Nineteen Minutes about school shootings that shootings done by our youth normally come from inside the house because they weren't adequately locked away from temperamental teens and little hands.
It takes me twenty minutes in between each number to come up with something to say. 49 is too many. Why do I have to write so many?
Twenty one people were shot in a McDonalds in 1984. A beautiful and talented twenty two year old was just shot and killed after a concert. In 1991, twenty three were murdered in a Texas restaurant. Twenty four hours later, we forget. The tragedies are nothing but trending topics, and we are not here to fix it but to send thoughts and prayers and feel lucky that it wasn't us and move on. By the twenty fifth of December in 2012, we had all but forgotten the twenty six children and teachers who would not celebrate Christmas that year. Twenty seven if you include the shooter's mother that he also killed. We cried, we tweeted, we expressed our sympathy, and then we moved on and hardly looked back. Despite only having twenty eight days, February of 2016 has harbored the most amount of school shootings. We don't know those victims, we can't name those locations. We can name the twenty nine year old Orlando shooter, but probably can't name one of the lives that he took. His name doesn't matter, theirs do.
It takes me thirty minutes in between each number to come up with something to say. 49 is too many. Why do I have to write so many?
What hurts me, what shakes me, is that even if you took every day of a thirty one day month, you couldn't dedicate one day to each victim because of the amount. You can't with the thirty two killed in Blackburg VA, either. We can't remember them all. There have been one hundred and thirty three shootings in 2016 alone, and that'll be inaccurate by the time you read this. There are too many shooters. The median age of them has shifted to thirty four from thirty five. There are too many shooters. In thirty six states there's no legal requirements for gun registration. It'll probably soon be at thirty seven because our country is going the wrong way. There have been thirty eight states with school shootings. It'll probably soon be at thirty nine because our country is going the wrong way.
It takes me forty minutes in between each number to come up with something to say. 49 is too many. Why do I have to do so many?
Bruce Springsteen wrote a song called forty one shots about an unarmed man who was shot 41 times, but we don't think guns are possibly a problem. Forty two percent of the world's guns are in the hands of U.S. citizens, but we don't think guns are a problem. Forty three other cases of gun violence occurred in the same damn day as the Orlando shooting, but we don't think guns are a problem. But we don't change a damn thing. Our attention on this topic only lasts as long as the topic trends. Less than a day after the Orlando shooting, #prayfororlando was already down to forty four on the top trends list. Forty five minutes after the attack, we are reading what others have to say, tweeting our condolences, genuinely caring. Forty six minutes after the attack, we go on with our regularly scheduled life. Forty seven minutes after the attack, we've sent hashtags and thoughts and prayers and because people kill people we realize there's nothing we can do. Forty eight hours later, as families and friends grieve through unexplainable and incomprehensible heartbreak, we move on. We move on. We forget about the forty nine victims, the forty nine beautiful souls. We move on, as if forty nine dead doesn't rattle us to our core, as if we have accepted this as how our country is going to be. But this is not how it is going to be. We will not let hate or fear win. We will not stop fighting for justice. We will never let that forty nine become commonplace.
It took me more than two days, more than forty nine hours to write this. 49 is too many. Why do I have to write so many?
Why did you kill so many?
