Close your eyes and imagine the four people you love most in the world. They might be your family, they might be your friends, and one of them might be the person you want to spend forever with.
Imagine their smiles. Imagine the things about them that you love most. Recall the best times you’ve had together, and think about all of the people who love them, including yourself.
Now imagine that those four people are dead.
Imagine that something terrible happened to them, something that could’ve been prevented.
Now imagine that people across the country are saying that there isn’t a problem. They’re saying that it’s only four people, and that that small of a number of lives doesn’t mean much in the grand scheme of things. Four deaths do not indicate a problem.
The four people you love most are gone, and no one thinks that there is a problem. Some would even boast that the number four is a good thing. It’s a small number compared to what could be, compared to what everyone fears.
Even imagine that it’s only one person. The one person you love most.
Apparently Awr Hawkins, writer of this article for Breitbart Online, has never stopped to think this way.
In his article discussing the “reality” of the number of mass shootings across America in the last year, he cites an article written by Mark Follman in The New York Times, saying that the truth about the sheer multitude of mass shootings in the last year have been radically inflated.
“Note–The left claims 355 mass shootings this year alon[e] while Mother Jones’ research shows only 73 mass shootings since 1982. How can this be?
It is easy to understand when you consider the standard FBI measure for a mass shootings is a minimum of four fatalities in one incident.
And I guess my problem isn’t that what he’s saying isn’t true. Because the truth is that any act of gun violence that results in multiple people wounded or worse in this country is considered a mass shooting. My problem is the tone of cynicism with which people like these two writers address the public’s view of gun violence.
Because they way they look at it, we’re all alarmists, running around shouting about how there have been more mass shootings than days in 2015 for America. According to them, we all need to get a grip on reality.
That should bother you. That should bother all of us.
It should bother everyone that we live in a country where people will pick and choose, speculating the definition of words like “mass shooting” instead of becoming part of the solution.
What these people fail to realize when they talk about four being a small number, or about mass shooting being too strong of a word for three people being killed by a single gunman, is that all people who are killed by gun violence have families. They all have people who love them.
We are so desensitized to violence and to death that we hear about another shooting, we remark on how sad it is, and we go about living our lives, content to consider ourselves a safe distance away from those who would hurt us.
What we don’t realize is that every single time someone is killed by an aggressor with a gun, families and friends and loved ones are participating in the imagining we did in the beginning of this article. But they can’t make it stop. It’s not an exercise in awareness for those people. It’s their reality.
And the number of people who are living in that reality is rapidly growing. Even worse, the number of people who are so brutally taken from those who love them is growing. Whatever your definition for mass shooting is, people are dying. And before long, that’s going to be a reality that we might all have to face. Because the longer we feign safety, and the longer we distance ourselves, the closer the danger becomes.
Remember those who have been taken. Pray for those who have lost so much. And instead of pretending that there is no problem, and waiting for something to happen close enough to have an effect on you, become part of the conversation. Help make a change. This is a growing epidemic, and it’s going to take more than just those who have been hurt to make it better.
