I’m still trying to wrap my head around the shooting this week on the campus of my undergraduate alma mater, the University of Virginia. A student who was on the football team for a short time his freshman year shot and killed three students currently on the team, and injured two other students, one of them critically. The school had been investigating a report that he had a gun, but he was not cooperating in the investigation. But he is now in police custody.
I’m imagining what it would have been like to cower in my Lawn Room at U.Va. during the lockdown, maybe having heard the shots in the distance, and knowing the gunman was still out there. And, as the mother of a college student, I’m trying not to imagine my own son, on a different campus, being on such a lockdown. Or worse.
Similar events keep happening at K-12 schools and universities all over the country. Yet we do little to limit the types of guns available and to make sure only responsible gun owners can have them. Yes, Republicans keep telling us that the problem isn’t guns; it’s mental health. Yet they do nothing to increase access to mental health services. And Democrats don’t step up and insist on it.
How many more times does this have to happen before we get serious about preventing these incidents?
The Petrini Page 