On Las Vegas Murders

I have been aching to give my opinion and it is not my nature to refrain from doing so, therefore I will submit however reluctantly to the impulse knowing full well what a mistake I am making:

I find it repulsive and unacceptable that we live in a society where a person shoots 500 people in a single incident, or where over 500 people are murdered in a single city's streets in a single year. What concerns me even more is that the situation appears to be getting worse, and yet, we seem unable or unwilling to approach the problem with a problem solving attitude. Instead we seem determined to escalate the situation through combative and polarizing speech and discourse. And again, what seems even more concerning to me is that the violence itself seems to be only one symptom of many of a much larger sickness in our society and the only remedies that get bantered about do not begin to address the larger cancer that eats at the soul of our society, but only poorly address its symptoms.

We lionize those who are killed in the battlefields of the world, while we have almost disregard for the thousands more who die in our streets, many who are the same veterans who have returned from the battlefields to die in our streets. We should honor those who sacrifice to make the world a better, more free world, and what better way to honor them, than to work tirelessly to provide a society worthy of their sacrifice?

I don't pretend to have wisdom, but I do know that very hard problems are never solved by one or two people working in isolation. Until we actually come together and make a determination to work together in a spirit of problem resolution and not partisanship to solve the really complex problems we face I am afraid many more Americans will ultimately be victims of this senseless violence in our society. I pray that you and I and our families will escape its wrath, but that is a shallow, mean-spirited prayer that prays someone else's family will be its victim instead.