re: #163 stpaulbear

I’m not sure if this WaPo story was mentioned in earlier threads, but I read it at work today and wound up with a huge lump in my throat. I will never understand gun culture. To me, this was horrifying.

After a toddler accidentally shot and killed his older sister, a family’s wounds run deep

This paragraph:

In the car now, she turns the volume up so loud that conversation with her boyfriend becomes impossible. She grips the wheel tightly, looks straight ahead and mouths the words of a song as she steers a car that has, among other things, a loaded gun in the glove box. It’s a 9mm — the same caliber that killed Kimi — but while her anger bothers her, guns don’t. She doesn’t feel nervous around that gun or any other gun. She’s more scared of not having one. She still has a child to raise, and what if there’s an intruder, and that intruder has a gun, and she doesn’t? How would she recover from that? How could she live knowing she could have protected Jaxon but had decided she was too afraid to have a gun?

And that, right there, is why her daughter is dead.

Guns are cool, shooting guns is fun. But they should never, ever NOT make you nervous.