OREGON

For the rest of yesterday, after the news broke that a shooting had happened in a community college outside Roseburg, I set the information in the back of my mind as it came and refused to deal with it.  This morning’s New York Times and L.A. Times confirmed that it is true. I didn’t dream it.  The news bulletins yesterday were true.  So we deal with it.  

Oregon has always been special in my thinking.  Death happens to people there the same as it is supposed to happen.  Sometimes a vehicle mishap on a city street or on an interstate highway brings to an end someone’s life, and that’s to be expected.  But nobody is supposed to walk into a school and kill ten people… even one person; and to hurt seven or eight or nine people.  What’s the thinking that is supposed to go on later.  Now is later.  The thinking that goes on later (now) includes more than a hint, a suggestion,  that something is wrong.  What do we do now?

Guns!  What are we supposed to do with guns.  There is little use for guns by most of our neighbors.  Only a few people hunt.  If a gun is appropriate for a job, the institution a person works for provides it… a gun doesn’t need to be taken home.  As a matter of fact, no one needs a gun outside a work environment. Yet in America, we yield to a cry by a sizable number of voters to make guns available to the people who make themselves believe they should be able to have them.  In 1995 there were estimated by be 200 million guns in private hands.  about a 50 percent jump.  The US population, now over 314 million, greater by about 20 percent in between 1995 and now.  

America has become more heavily armed.  A precise count of guns in America isn’t possible because gyms in the U.S. aren’t registered and the government has scant ability to track them, thanks to a legislative landscape shaped by powerful pro-gun groups such as the National Rifle Association.  At the present rate of gun ownership in the U.S., there will be a gun for every man, woman, and child before the decade ends.  Is that what we want?  Will we be safer?