Again
I’m writing to you all, again, with a heavy heart, as I have done other times following a mass shooting. Yet again, we’re forced to ask why we live in a time when our politicians protect guns, not people.
Lewiston, Maine is a small town. It is the kind of place where people leave their doors unlocked. I know this because I went to college there and have been back to visit frequently. My daughter also went to school there. She spent the past two years teaching in a small elementary school and working on nutrition equity and education. Tonight, parents who were at teacher conferences at her school when one of the shooting happened—five minutes from the site of one of the shootings—are still in lock down.
It doesn’t make sense and it will never make sense. The assault rifle the shooter is seen with in pictures is not the musket that the Founding Fathers had in mind when they wrote the Second Amendment. The shooter who has senselessly take the lives of more than twenty people and injured many more is not a member of a well-organized militia. There is no reason we cannot do more to regulate firearms in our society, except that the Supreme Court, Congress, and state legislatures take positions that keep us vulnerable.
We’ll probably learn more details about the shooter and the crime overnight. But none of that will change the fact that people feel unsafe in their homes tonight. People will wake up to learn they’ve lost loved ones. Our gun laws are broken and it is hurting all of us.
There are things I wanted to write about tonight, but they will wait for tomorrow. Hold your loved ones close.
We’re in this together,
Joyce
The solution is simple.
If you care about protecting life, vote for Democrats. Get the Republicans out of office at every level of government and let’s start passing laws that put people first once again.
Thank you Joyce. I pray for your daughter’s safety. I, too, love Lewiston and all of Maine as one of the prettiest parts of the country and I will never understand why the individual right to a gun is more important than our individual right not to get our heads blown off in random violence. The disrespect and contempt that the extreme Right heaps on anyone who doesn’t assume their cockeyed view of the right to bear arms is dangerous and enraging. I am so tired of minority rule I just can’t stand it.