30,000 Lives

That’s how many people—more or less—die from gunshot wounds every year.

OK, be fair. A surprising number—over fifty percent—are suicides. Some are mishaps / accidents. Maybe forty-five percent are homicides.

Does it matter? Only ten thousand people murdered; hey—that’s nothing! 

Yeah? Every September 11^th, we all gather and recite three thousand names. Yet ten times as many people die every year from guns! And does it make a difference whether it’s you or someone else who pulls the trigger?

It’s a life lost.

I know a bit about that. I’ve had a brother scream at me, so concerned was he about my own planned death. And in my last trip to Chicago, I entered the seedy hotel where I bunked over, in my journeys from Wisconsin to Puerto Rico.

And discovered the manager, shaking, and calling 911.

The housekeeper had discovered the body.

She came out, a moment later, to smoke a cigarette and watch them collect the body. The paramedics came out, got the gurney from the back of the ambulance, entered the hotel. Sixty seconds later, they came out.

Everything—head included—covered by a sheet.

They returned with the gurney to the hotel. And came back with two suitcases, uncovered.

Took less than five minutes.

“He killed himself,” said the housekeeper. “So young, just 33 years old….”

One down—29, 999 to go?

“It’s surprisingly hard to kill yourself,” I wrote elsewhere. And I thought at the time of the decade I spent as a psychiatric nurse. Borderlines would come whimpering to show us the scratches they had carved on their wrist.

“Oh, let me get you some hydrogen peroxide to wash that off,” I’d say. “And would you like a Band-Aid?”

It’s anatomically almost impossible to slit your wrists deeply enough to hit the artery….

Tylenol? Curiously, for most people, nothing happens for the first 24 hours after ingestion.

“Just take a seat, Hon, I gotta see to this ingrown toenail….” a friend in the ER used to say, when the lost girls with their teddy bears arrived, empty Tylenol bottle in hand.

But a gun?

That’s serious. 

OK—sharp turn here. In a recent development, the University of Colorado psychiatrist who had been treating James Holmes warned the university that he posed a risk.

Did she warn the city?

And the university did nothing, since Holmes dropped out. 

Did he stop being a risk?

And does Colorado have a mental health background check?

It’s madness beyond words. 

Here’s what I’m gonna do.

I’m gonna start a petition on Signon.org . I’m gonna ask for thirty thousand signatures. Then, I’m gonna sit in the coffee shop that has now become my office and read them. I’ll film it, and put it on YouTube.

Any idea how long it’ll take?