Note: while most of the work I put out there is suitable for most age groups, this one contains some graphic descriptions of forensics and a few ear muff worthy words. Please keep this in mind if talking about this with children.
And yes, I know I am supposed to be on a break. I get it. And I was. For four hours. Then nearly two dozen people were brutally murdered by yet another maniac with access to a weapon of war in Maine.
For those of you that scrolled through, the descriptions have concluded. What stands out in recent years is the sheer amount of children giving haunting interviews about their experiences. It is fair to say that such an experience brings an end to their childhood, and catapults them, in disorientating fashion, into adulthood. Thus the next section could be fairly titled,
The "We Could Make A Documentary From Child Victim Interviews Alone" Stage of American Gun Violence.
From an account by a 10 year-old in Lewiston.
Little Zoey clearly sees herself as an adult now.
Mother Meghan Hutchinson said, "When I turned around, I saw the shooter. ... I don't know if that was just a warning shot or if he shot somebody with that [bullet]."
Her daughter, Zoey Levesque, 10, was grazed by a bullet.
"It's just like, shocking," she said. "I never thought I'd grow up and get a bullet in my leg," she said. "Like, why do people do this? I was more worried about, like, am I going to live and going to make it out of here? Like, what's going to happen? Are the cops going to come?"
I don’t know what to do for that child. I don’t have the training or even, the perspective to begin to advise on how to put the pieces of that little girl’s psyche back together. Any ideas?
I have some ideas as to how to drive the point home about the toll of this situation. What we could do is establish a memorial for victims of gun violence, and children could get their own section. I say that because the number one cause of childhood mortality is not poverty, it is gun violence. It is not leukemia, it is gun violence.
Firearms accounted for nearly 19% of childhood deaths (ages 1-18) in 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Wonder database. Nearly 3,600 children died in gun-related incidents that year. That’s about five children lost for every 100,000 children in the United States. In no other comparable country are firearms within the top four causes of mortality among children, according to a KFF analysis.
More children in our nation are dying at a clip yearly, than the number of lives lost on 9-11. Put another way, this is the mortality equivalent of 1.2 9-11’s in children alone, each year, because the guns were deemed by the right wing to be more valuable.
And the ones that are surviving are put through such emotionally scarring experiences that their lives will forever be altered. We used to care about children right?
But back to the memorial. What could this wall say? How about,
“The Children Who Have Died So You Can Have Your Freedom to Play Toy Soldier Memorial.”
That might work.
But nothing has so far.
Oh sure the Republicans will send thoughts.
But I am all out of “Fucks to Give” for their thoughts.
I looked online, too.
Couldn’t find them anywhere. Apparently the whole world is all out of Fucks.
Must be a supply chain issue.
-ROC
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Bottom: The new reality.
If you or someone you know has been traumatized by gun violence, BradyUnited.org has a list of resources that may be able to help.
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