Not even a week after I wrote this, the headlines read that there was another mass shooting, this time at a shopping center in El Paso, Texas. Tabs on my web browser constantly refresh as I get more and more live updates, and lines go out the door at hospitals as friends, families, and community members donate their blood, because God knows too much has been lost already.
And just thirteen hours later, I hear news of a shooter in Dayton, Ohio, and the sky is dark and heavy. Nine more were killed.
This is not okay.
Forty-seven hours ago, I heard the phrase “there is an active shooter at Gilroy Gardens” as someone whispered into their phone on their bus, and I had only felt panic arise that fast one other time before. Nearly two full days later, I’m reading reports on the LA Times, ABC 7, and any news station I can get my hands on to hear who the victims are.
I hear the names Stephen Romero and Keyla Salazar, both from San Jose, and I wonder if they are one of the kids I used to coach at my community sports camp, or one of my campers at my church’s VBS. Did I know them? See them at the grocery store? How often have I run by their houses?
As more names are being released, I feel my heart rate ramping up as my imagination wanders to who the other victims are. My friends. My family. My teachers. The people I grew up with and around, the community that formed me to who I am today.
I’m wondering and hoping and praying and praying and praying, and goodness gracious, I am so scared. Ever since Sandy Hook, the thoughts is my school next? or even worse, is my brother next? have wandered through my mind every so often, but this week as I volunteer again for a camp I’ve been at for the past 12 years and I get to work with and coach 27 little munchkins, many of whom I’ve seen grow up through the years, I look at my kiddos and immediately have this feeling of fear for how quickly their sheer existence could end. I think of my younger brother, a senior now in high school, and the paranoia that tells me that every time he goes to hang out with friends or even just goes to class could be the time, is starting to feel less like paranoia and more like a tragic and unpredictable reality.
I am shaken to my core, because I had planned to go to the Gilroy Garlic Festival after church that day, and if I hadn’t remembered I had to work that day, I very well could have been, likely would have been, among those masses running, fleeing, mind racing.
Whenever I read shootings in the news, I feel a pang to my heart, and this sense of helplessness overwhelms me. But this time, this time, I am more terrified than I have ever been after readings the updates, because it really could have been me, and the only thing that separated me from being there was a slightly above minimum wage job.
As a tactile, goal-driven person, I like to know what to do and put things in order. Having resources and knowing things is my thing. But this? This, I have no idea what to do. What I do know is that it is not okay that I am this frightened. It’s not okay that any public place I go to is at risk. Or that there have been 46 mass shootings in the United States in July alone—that’s three every two days.
I don’t want to say that we should make guns illegal, but I do want to say that there is clearly something wrong with the current system and society that makes these shootings so frequent. Accessibility, mental health resources, privilege, lack of education. There’s are so many underlying issues that will take time to unearth, but the type-A ENFJ begs the question what I—what we—can do now and what barriers we can put in to stop mass shootings from becoming a normal tabloid headline. And I have no idea.