In my lifetime, the citizens of the United States have witnessed over 1300 school shootings.
That we can still react with shock, horror, and grief is good.

There are roughly 131,000 K-12 public and private schools in this country. So fewer than 1% of our schools have been the site of a shooting.
Another way to say that is that more than 99% of U.S. schools have never had a shooting on campus. That’s good, too.

So the vast majority of children in our country can expect to attend school without being shot there. That’s very good. That we have to make such calculations to comfort ourselves is not good.

In 2021, 17 persons died in school shootings. Is that an acceptable number for the “right” to own guns or certain kinds of guns? Only 17 people have to die in a year so I can pose in a TikTok video with my AR-15 semi-automatic rifle to show everyone how cool I am! Or worse!

When some human lives become expendable in the pursuit of wants by others, we have all lost some of our own humanity.

Don’t let anyone tell you that it’s not as bad as we think. If there is an acceptable number of children lying in their own blood next to their own desk in their own classroom, then it’s much worse than we have imagined.

In wisdom, grace, and heartbreak,

Rev. Ruth