Post Mass-Shooting Checklist
- By Rhiannon
- June 12, 2016
- Comments Off on Post Mass-Shooting Checklist
This morning, we woke up to news of another mass shooting. A friend told me the overview of what happened, and it took hours for me to gather up the motivation to look into it myself.
Why do the details even matter, anymore? I felt like I had a post-mass-shooting checklist I needed to go through. Each event is pretty much like the last, where I check off the boxes:
- Find out how many people lost their lives.
- Find out what every-day thing those people were doing.
- Mentally catalog my friends to determine if there are any I should worry about.
- Reflect on how I have been in that situation in the past, and how every time I’m in that situation in the future, I’ll have this incident in the back of my mind.
- Watch my liberal friends share information regarding necessary gun control.
- Watch my conservative friends pray for the victims and their families.
- Try to find ways that make this event unique, ways to convince myself that it could only happen (just like this) once.
- Answer texts from my friends, in Europe, that simply want to know “Why are you guys like that?”
- Try to find something I can do.
- Realize there is so little that one person can do.
- Express trivial outrage.
- Move on with life.
- Wake up to news of another mass shooting.
A friend of mine pointed out that she has to decide if she should tell her children, and if so, decide what she will say. Another friend works with people traveling frequently, and has work obligations after each event. I keep trying to think of ways to make this post more light-hearted, but this is the world in which we live. A world where people have a process they regularly go through after hearing about a mass killing.
What’s on your morning-after-a-mass-shooting checklist?
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