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...

It's been 20+ years now since the school massacre known as 'Columbine'. It is very difficult, even now, to revisit a lot of what happened that day, although I still get asked that question more times than I care to remember. The emotions surrounding the events of that day can be, and sometimes still are, visceral, palpable, raw. They'll likely remain that way for as long as I live. I reference 'events' of the day in the plural form because the massacre was not a single event. April 20, 1999 did not begin, nor did it end, with the onset and cessation of this violent conflagration. Not even close! Even after the last explosive devices were detonated and the last shots were fired, the 'events' of the day continued and multiplied for everyone involved in this incident...families of those who were murdered, families of those who were injured, families of those who were there that day and survived with no outward physical injuries, the Columbine Com...

Three years ago I was asked a series of questions by a high school student from Medellin, Columbia. One of those questions was "How Can People With Suicidal/Homicidal Ideation Be Helped". Because September is  National Suicide Prevention Month , I decided to reprise the blog post I wrote then in response to her question with some revisions/updates. Disclaimer: To be very clear right from the get go on this blog post..... I am NOT a medical professional, nor do I claim to have any medical training in the areas of mental illness and criminology. I'm not a doctor, a psychologist, a psychiatrist, a therapist, a social worker, or any other member of the medical community anyone can conjure up. I'm not a member of law enforcement of any kind, either. I am merely someone in the lay community having a modicum of personal experience as a direct result of the near homicide of two of my children and the successful act of suicide of my first wife, Carla. As such, what ...

Emergency management....what the heck is it and why should anyone care? I don't know how many times when people ask me what I do and I tell them I'm an emergency management specialist, they look at me like what planet are you from? Well, in the interest of full transparency, I'm a retired emergency management specialist, but I still get that same look no matter how I couch it. For those who've never really thought about or heard of emergency management it's nothing more, really, than managing emergencies...or trying to as it were. On a broad societal scale, the definition in the graphic above applies and it takes someone with a certain skill-set to be able to 'game the system' in order to make it work. On an individual level, though, we've all done it, and we're all gonna continue to do it....especially if we have accident prone kids or we're responsible for accident prone adults like me. We manage cuts, bruises, scratches, broken bo...