Two men are dead after a shooting on the UCLA campus today. The victims are presumed to be a student and his Professor. It's being called a murder-suicide.
My oldest daughter was sitting at our kitchen table scanning social media, while I ate the rest of her broccoli beef bowl from Panda Express. She looked up.
"There was a shooting at UCLA."
We both gasped.
"Oh no."
"What happened?"
Fifteen seconds later, she Googled and found an article that outlines the details and pronounces the campus safe.
And we both exhale.
And all I can really say to this whole shitshow is, "WTF WORLD?"
What sort of world do we live in where a shooting is a RELIEF, just because it didn't involve more than a couple of people?
What kind of world do we live in where we breathe a collective sigh of relief at the story of a murder-suicide?
The kind of world where shootings happen. A lot. The kind of world where our hearts have been broken over and over at the image of dead children, dead students, dead teachers, dead humans.
Planned Parenthood in Colorado: 3 dead, 9 injured
Umpqua Community College in Oregon: 9 dead, 9 injured
Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut: 27 dead, 1 injured
Century 16 movie theater in Aurora, Colorado: 12 dead, 58 injured
Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia: 33 dead, 17 injured
These are just a few of the shootings that we've watched unfold on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News (except not me because no Fox News ever) in the last few years. Just a few of the shootings that have made us tragically accustomed to seeing people die at the hands of other people, and the guns they can so easily obtain.
Is gun violence so often part of our conversation that we are barely fazed when two people die instead of 20?
