Two dead. Twenty-two injured, some seriously, some not. All because someone brought a gun to a large house party in the Cypress area of Harris County, Texas, a suburb outside of Houston. No one knows the motive of the shooters (believed to be two people) but does it matter in a country where shootings like this one occur on a daily basis in communities all across the United States? From the Houston Chronicle:
More than 100 people, mostly young adults, were at a house celebrating a birthday, officials with the sheriff’s office said.
A man and a woman were killed, according to a news release sent by the office. One died at the party and the other at Cypress Fairbanks Medical Center Hospital. […]
The others shot have injuries ranging from serious to non-life threatening, said Thomas Gilliland, spokesman with the Sheriff’s Office. Some were shot in the foot or ankle. Others were shot in the hip, he said. Most of the injured were from 17 to 20 and were taken to five area hospitals.
One party-goer described the gunshots as sounding like “balloons popping” and seeing people bleeding as he tried to move others toward the house garage. A neighbor told the reporters that the scene was chaotic, with teenage girls screaming and pounding on the front doors of other houses in the neighborhood, pleading for someone to call 911.
War on terror? We are living it everyday in our own country. No one can predict when another innocent person will be shot or killed. Of course some communities, especially the poor and minorities have been living with this level of gun violence for too many years to count, even from the police, who are supposed to protect them, as Denise Oliver Velez so eloquently, yet with righteous anger, details for us in her front-paged story. You think you are safe? I’ll bet those kids at this birthday celebration did, too, before this happened to them. I’m sure the people in Aurora and Tuscon and Newtown and The Washington Navy Yard and … well, how many incidents could I list? Too many, far too many.
And still, as a nation we do nothing. We turn our eyes away. Even the most senseless and horrific slaughter of six year old children, a turning point so many said when it happened less than a year ago, seems to have faded from our collective memory. Certainly it has faded from the memories of all the politicians and news media pundits who proclaimed that this time something would be done. Yet, what steps have been taken nationally to end the gun slaughters. I’m not talking about a few isolated states like Colorado and New York. Indeed, if anything more states have gone the other way, such that many states now have laws that permit an increase in the use of gun play in public or have proposed further relaxation of current laws.
Is this freedom? I don’t think so. It’s madness.
My sincere condolences to the families of the latest victims in Harris County, Texas, and across the United States. It doesn’t count for much I know, and I’m very sorry for that, too.
