“Unfortunately, this is a situation where tempers flared, and someone let anger get the best of them,” Irmo Police Chief Robert Dale said. “One rash decision has impacted the lives of two families and countless others who witnessed this tragic event,” Dale stated. “Senseless is the only word I can think of to describe what happened today.” (Lexington Chronicle, February 14, 2023)

One woman was killed yesterday by another woman she did not know in the parking lot of a local grocery store fifteen minutes from our home. Random act of violence, right? Who hasn’t gotten angry over another vehicle sliding into a parking spot we were waiting for? Or maybe a new shiny SUV was taking up two parking spaces near the door to the store – that’s an entitled elite being entitled and elite, for God’s sake. Makes me mad just to think about it. My blood boils. Hateful words hurled at the other woman over the parking space or whatever the important issue was at 4 o’clock in the afternoon on Valentine’s Day when someone needed candy or cookies. The shouting between the two women intensified, grew louder. Cell phones taking a video…

If I had a gun, I’d shoot that bitch.

Oh, look. I do have a gun. Take this. Trigger pulled. Boom. End of discussion.

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The killer in the tragedy yesterday was a twenty-three year old woman who turned herself in to the police and has now been charged with murder. The victim was twenty-six years old, did not know her killer, but what happened was known. The casual encounter of the two women led to an “altercation” in the parking lot – an altercation that then escalated to a gun being fired and a life taken. Really, two lives were taken while traumatized witnesses who will also never be the same watched in horror and disbelief.

Just another Valentine’s Day massacre of someone in America following a mass murder the night before on the campus of Michigan State University where three students were killed and five more seriously wounded by a man who then killed himself which brought the count to four known dead. Anyone who has access to news knows “gun violence is a fixture in American life.” (BBC)

The population of the United States is currently estimated at 336 million by Worldometer with the number of guns in the US close to 400 million. I can’t wrap my brain around this insanity. The inmates are running the asylum – and they are heavily armed. I can, however, wrap my brain around two young women going to a grocery store on Valentine’s Day with only one surviving to drive away.

Did the woman with the gun carry it in plain sight of the woman she shot or was it concealed in her purse, her handbag? Did the woman with the gun have a Concealed Weapon Permit for it? That’s for the prosecution and defense to discover in the coming days. However the shooter obtained the gun, however she carried her gun, whether legally or illegally, another woman is dead because she was shot by that gun.

Molly Ivins was a syndicated columnist with Creators Syndicate, Inc. and on March 13, 1993 published a column called Taking a Stab at our Infatuation with Guns. Thirty years later her words sadly continue to be relevant.

In truth, there is no rational argument for guns in this society. This is no longer a frontier nation in which people hunt their own food. It is a crowded, overwhelmingly urban country in which letting people have access to guns is a continuing disaster. Those who want guns – whether for target shooting, hunting or potting rattlesnakes (get a hoe) – should be subject to the same restrictions placed on gun owners in England – a nation in which liberty has survived nicely without an armed populace.

The argument that “guns don’t kill people” is patent nonsense. Anyone who has ever worked in a cop shop knows how many family arguments end in murder because there was a gun in the house. Did the gun kill someone? No. But if there had been no gun, no one would have died. At least not without a good footrace first. Guns do kill...letting the noisy minority in the National Rifle Association force us to allow this carnage to continue is just plain insane. Ban the damn things. Ban them all.

You want protection? Get a dog.

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Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Hopefully.