It's Been Said....

Perhaps 'are we done yet' should be qualified as a rhetorical question because, obviously, we aren't done yet when it comes to mass shootings. In fact, mass shootings....all kinds of mass shootings....have seen a significant uptick this year.  My go-to source for up-to-date gun violence stats, including all categories of mass shootings, is the non-profit organization,  Gun Violence Archive (GVA) . They have a presence on  GVA Twitter  and on GVA Facebook .  GVA's most recent stats show 296 mass shootings in the U.S. as of June 22, 2021. That's more than a significant uptick from the previous year. It's a downright scary uptick:   Link to Image on Twitter:  Gun Violence Archive Mass Shootings There's also quite a bit of confusion out there as to what a mass shooting actually is. To be clear,  GVA uses a purely statistical threshold to define mass shooting based ONLY on the numeric value of 4 or more shot or killed, not including the shooter. ...

What follows may not sit very well with some folks. I hope it does, but if it doesn't, that's ok. It took me a loooooong time to come up with something that I hope speaks truth to reality, truth with compassion, truth with empathy, and even truth with sympathy. That isn't easy when talking about school safety related to school massacres and the fallout that ensues. So, please take what I have to say with a proverbial grain of salt and take it in the spirit it is intended.....the highest good for safer schools. Truth is, following school massacres, we often see parents whose children were murdered or injured become advocates for school safety or gun safety reform or both. I kinda sorta include myself in both....to a degree. My focus is mostly on school safety, although I've been known to not back down from a challenging 'discussion' on gun safety reform, either. Both kinds of advocacy sometimes take on a strident, sometimes adversarial tone. The most vocal parent...

It all started out innocuously enough....or so I thought. The idea was to create a meme....a thought provoking meme on the issue of school safety vis a vis gun safety reform. I won't call it gun control any longer for several reasons, not the least of which is the word 'control' has become a lightning rod in this ongoing debate. And, control really is an illusion when one comes right down to it. But I digress. The meme was intended to help demonstrate my belief that gun violence, and the singular focus thereon, can have a harmful effect on school safety efforts overall because gun safety reform efforts are so predominant nationally....especially given the recent spike in gun violence incidents nationally. That includes in, or near, schools, too. Here's the meme: The meme was shared on several social media pages and in several groups. And that's how the fight started..... The pushback was pretty intense, and it was immediate. It came primarily from, how shall I say t...

No, this blog post isn’t about the #Enough campaign to end gun violence, a hashtag phenomenon I see quite often on social media. Not even a little bit. It’s about something entirely different. Rather, it’s about when whole communities come to the aid of those affected by mass school shootings, and that aid gets to a point, at least in my own personal healing journey, where it's simply MORE than enough and then some. Robin Cogan, a friend of mine on Twitter, tagged me in one of her tweets asking me for my input on this article: New Study: After School Shootings, Well-Off Families Flee and Enrollment Drops. Low-Income Kids are Left to Confront the Aftermath . After having read it, I decided it might be better to just write a blog post about it, and so here we are. The article’s primary focus is on people living in communities affected by mass school shootings and what happens in the aftermath as they struggle for their own survival which can sometimes also mean struggling with whethe...