This Is America

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For years I’ve been reading about mass shootings. School shootings. Campus shootings. Shootings in bars. Shootings at concerts. Las Vegas. Orlando. Virginia Tech. Sandy Hook. Parkland. The stories keep coming, and each new one elicits horror. We can’t help but be dumbstruck by the senseless carnage. But there’s also some small measure of relief. Not me. Not my town. Not my school. Not this time. You can’t sit and bask in that relief, however, because there will always be more shootings. “There but for the grace of God go I,” I always think. I’m not religious, so it doesn’t make much sense to bring God into it. But sometimes humans don’t make much sense.

On Wednesday a man in Middleton, Wisconsin, took a semi-automatic pistol to work and shot four people before police arrived and killed him. As far as mass shootings go, it was no big deal. Four wounded, none dead. But it hit close to home because it happened in my community, ten miles away from my house.

The shooting occurred at about 10:30am, when I was getting ready to go work out. I missed the breaking news and arrived at the gym oblivious to what was happening. I worked on perfecting a few yoga poses while the speakers blasted Childish Gambino’s “This is America.” Due to some playlist shuffling fluke, the song played twice. As I settled into Warrior 2, I pictured a half-naked Donald Glover blasting a bullet into the back of a man’s head. Dancing around and then gunning down a gospel choir. This is America.

Meanwhile, across town, police were swarming a Middleton office park, shuttling the victims away in ambulances and evacuating the rest of the employees to a nearby hotel.

I drove home and started texting with a friend about dinner plans for later in the week. We picked a time and place, and then she texted, “The active shooter in Middleton was at WTS Paradigm where N- and J- work. They are both safe. “

There but for the grace of God go I.

I spent the afternoon refreshing my browser, hoping to find reports of a motive, some explanation to give the violence context and meaning. But even when police find a motive, the explanation never feels sufficient. The chasm between what sparked the anger — some petty grievance or imagined injustice — and the violence itself is unbridgeable. The gunman in my town—Anthony Tong—was employed by the software company he targeted, but police still don’t know why he did what he did. Disgruntled employee? It hardly matters. It’s all random. Wrong place. Wrong time. Wrong coworker or classmate.

There but for the grace of God go I.

In the late afternoon, I hit refresh again and got more breaking news. In Pennsylvania, a man had opened fire in the lobby of a courthouse, wounding four. And on Wednesday, while I was writing this post, a woman killed three people and wounded three others in a Rite Aid distribution center in Maryland before turning the gun on herself.

If you like news about shootings in Wisconsin, you might also like news about shootings in Pennsylvania in Maryland.

This is America.

This is America today, in 2018. But we can do better.

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Image credit:

Thomas Hawk via flickr

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