The violence was startling.
One minute a cute reporter was doing a fluff piece on TV. The next, screams and shots, and the screen goes blank.
That was reporter Alison Parker, 24, being shot point blank. The picture goes askew because cameraman Adam Ward, 27, was shot and killed as well.
The perpetrator was a former co-worker who took out his grievance of being fired on the two innocents.
Such is life in the U.S.
People vent their frustrations with guns. That’s how they “get even.”
Because the video of the shooting has gone viral, the story’s news cycle may last a tad longer than most shootings, but there’s no guarantee. Americans have become inured to such shootings.
That’s a problem.
As a country we need to change our views on how easily we accept gun violence.
In the United States, an average 33,000 deaths a year are attributable to guns, many, many times over that of other civilized countries.
This has nothing to do with someone’s constitutional right to own a gun, and everything to do with how the United States is a dangerous place to live.
Clearly, violence begets violence. To break this vicious cycle we need to address gun violence as a public health crisis in the sense that, while it has spiraled to an unfathomable extreme, it is also totally preventable.
Tighter gun laws, better background checks and a market with less lethal weaponry would all go a long way toward making us a safer country.
But even more effective would be if we as Americans worked to change our culture from accepting violence by guns as a natural phenomenon to seeing it as the scourge it has become.
— Susan Lynn
The real crime? Our tolerance of gun violence
