Would Have Been a Bloodbath

Last Friday at 9:30 in the morning, an Uber driver was shot. As the weekend began, four people were shot in a park in Beech Grove. One is dead. Then on Sunday, in the food court at Greenwood Park Mall around dinner time a 20-year old with 3 guns and more than 100 rounds began shooting. Three more people were killed and others were wounded, including a 12-year-old girl.

If it weren’t for another armed man, carrying a legal weapon, who shot and killed the shooter, it would have been a blood bath. “I’m going to tell you, the real hero of the day was the citizen that was lawfully carrying a firearm in the food court and was able to stop the shooter almost as soon as he began,” said Greenwood Police Chief, James Ison.

Unfortunately, the dead in Beech Grove had no defenders. Chief Michael Maurice of the Beech Grove Police Department spoke with great emotion, “Beech grove is not immune to what’s going on, not only in Indianapolis, but in the country. This isn’t the way…We need parents to step up, we need grandparents to step up, we need churches to step up to talk to their young people about how to handle conflict.”

I know the go-to answer is to remove guns from our society altogether. But realistically—and I think we should be realists if we want to stop this—guns aren’t going away any time soon, most certainly not the guns that are illegal to begin with. As the police chief said, we need parents, grandparents and churches to step up and talk about conflict resolution with kids. But we also need to protect our children’s futures with straight talk about laws and right action, goodness and virtue, as well as prisons and penalties for criminal activity. In short, we need parents to step up and be PARENTS.

But the rest of us have a job too. If we know someone with access to guns who is dangerous, has anger issues, or mental problems, we cannot sit idly by and wait for disaster to happen. If we see someone posting threats on social media, we cannot just shake our heads. Please, if you see something, say something and do something.

Innocent lives are at stake.
Nancy