Minnie’s Musings

So a young man has died at the hands of a ‘shooter’ yet again. This time it is all over the media because of who he is. His prominence in US politics has warranted flags at half mast.

I know nothing about this man – to the horror of my children – because I was never his target audience.
Is that why I greeted the news of his death with a sorrowful sigh, thinking “His poor family. How awful.”

Did my sadness match or exceed my sadness when a young black kid is stabbed on a London street yet again? In that instance I think of a mother whose deep seated fears have been horribly realised.

Did it match my sadness when a teenage girl gets a romantic notion in her head and disappears off to the desert and life as a bride of Isis? Leaving her family in desperate ignorance of her welfare, scared rigid for her life.

The sadness is added to by the very fact that he advocated against gun control. He became yet another casualty of the US love of their right to bare arms. With the hubris of youth did he think he was invincible?

At what point in life does it occur to you that the bad stuff that happens to other people can happen to you?

Having taught young people who are regularly lectured on the evils of cigarettes, drugs and (somewhat hypocritically) alcohol, riding on the handlebars of your mate’s bike and/or dodging traffic on the precipitous dual carriage way where some student from one of three high schools gets knocked down seemingly every single year.

So, I didn’t shrug and mutter “What goes around, comes around.” And wondered how long it would take the first posts to appear, pointing out the hideous irony of the death by gunfire of a man who advocated against gun control.

He died before he had lived enough to feel that fear.