I READ. Books about U.S. history, and research about gun ownership, and op-eds in news outlets, and everyday people's arguments for and against access to guns. But in the end I think we need stricter gun laws to stop the senseless loss of innocent lives.
So I VOTE. For the side that's been advocating for common sense gun legislation for years and getting shut down by the other side that's owned by the NRA. Depressingly, voting is not enough.
So I DONATE. A small number of my hard-earned dollars to try to make the NRA's money less necessary, even just a little. But I can recognize a losing battle when I see one.
So I WRITE. Emails to my elected representatives and Facebook statuses and blog posts. To try to feel slightly less useless, to try to be helpful, and hopeful.
But none of it matters.
I think about that class at Sandy Hook Elementary School, and the congregants at the Emanuel African Episcopal Church, and the young people at Pulse nightclub, and I feel a sadness so deep it must live in my marrow. Teachers and children. Black southerners. The LGBTQ community. These are the people that my country hates. These are the people that my country actively harms.
I don't know what to do.
I want to make signs and buy a megaphone and walk to Washington DC and call on people to join me and not stop to eat or sleep until I find myself on the steps of the Capitol Building and raise my voice and both of my fists and demand action DEMAND ACTION ACTION ACTION and refuse to do what I'm told or pay taxes or do my job until our spineless craven lily-livered cowardly corrupt pathetic excuse for a Congress does something anything EVEN ONE SINGLE THING to stop this from ever happening again.
I feel hopeless and depressed and disillusioned. But mostly what I feel is shame.
If only the Republican members of Congress felt it too.
Locations of the nearly 1,000 mass shootings in the United States since the Sandy Hook massacre in December 2012. Image from VoxMedia (
http://www.vox.com/a/mass-shootings-sandy-hook).
