I have been on the air for a span of 42 years. I have gone on the air shortly after my husband died, and shortly after a mastectomy, for which I’m told I’m cured. All kinds of things. But I’ll be honest and open like I always am. I am devastated today. It was just one sentence that was on the TV about the catastrophe in Nevada, I had to turn it off. They were repeating the same things over and over again, and it makes me insane.
But there are still bodies on the ground at the massacre site, where the concert was. Somehow with all the things they had said - 500 people injured, not just by gunshot wounds but running away and being trampled. We’re closing in on 60 dead people as if that wasn’t bad enough, when I heard there were still bodies on the ground.
I’m a mother and it doesn’t matter how old your kids are. I am very shaken. I identify with the abject horror and pain of the mothers who don’t know if one of those bodies is one of their kids on the ground.
My son and I and my daughter-in-law communicate every day - call, text, etc. This morning we talked on the phone before everybody got their day started. My son was in the military, a combat soldier in Afghanistan, and he was shaken and devastated. He said, “I was in hard core combat” (he still wears bracelets of friends who died in his presence). He said the video of Las Vegas was even worse than anything he saw in Afghanistan. A lot of military people are saying that, that this is the most horrible thing.
We have somebody’s dead children on the ground and politicians already playing politics. The point is well taken; it’s just the timing is self-serving. You don’t do politics when people are suffering and dying. You just don’t do that. My son and I are big on guns and big on the 2nd amendment and that hasn’t changed. But looking at each other on the phone we agreed that nobody needs a long distance automatic rifle with that kind of penetration. The notion is you’re supposed to be able to protect yourself, but the kind of rifles we’re talking about here are only necessary in combat.
Those kinds of guns are unnecessary for the public to have. I agree with that policy, but I think it’s nauseating the timing that these politicians have. It’s so self-serving that they don’t know that there are still dead kids lying on the ground. And that’s an image I can’t get past because I’m a mother and every one of those has a mother waiting to find out if one of those dead kids lying on the ground is theirs. And that torments me terribly.
I didn’t expect to wake up today to face this. It’s just unfathomable - evil is unfathomable because it has no limits.
