It’s sad to know that I now live in a country where mass shootings are an everyday occurrence. It’s gotten to a point where they are so everyday that people aren’t phased by hearing the news via radio, TV, or the internet. Mass shootings are part of American culture now in the same way that pop music and Saturday Night Live are. And this time, the San Bernadino shooting appears to have been done at a facility that helps persons with disabilities. How can you be more cruel than to hurt those who already have harder lives and are suffering more than the average person? The gun lobbyists don’t care that all these people are dying; they are pushing irrelevant concepts like mental illness. We can’t even require background checks for people who want to buy guns, which is completely senseless. And it’s become trite when you read articles like this and you see lines about these mass murderers being calm, good, upstanding citizens. In that sense, many of these people are first time (MASSIVE) offenders. How do we identify those who just want to start killing people for the sake of killing without any past history of crime or mental illness? In the mental illness case, many mental illnesses are undiagnosed and unrecognized. The debate could go on and on, but what we are inevitably doing as a society is turning a blind eye to the problem of guns. Easy gun access here is a huge problem that cannot be ignored. Yet it is. People will continue dying – the young, the old, and everyone in between.

Because just as a very succinct Tweet I read yesterday said, “In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate. Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.”

Seeing that in black and white on my Twitter screen was like pain to my eyes… because it is true.