We are all mass murderers (and all victims)

Every time there is a mass shooting, I imagine myself as a victim. Perhaps you've done the same. What would it feel like to be in the classroom ... the clinic ... at the Christmas party ... going about your daily life, only to see someone suddenly coming toward you with weapons? What would you do—what would you say—if the weapon were pointed at you? What does it feel like to have a bullet enter your body, to watch your blood pour out? To think, to know you will die?

Is it macabre that I imagine this? Perhaps. But it allows me to feel something of the terror of the victims in each of these murders. And it allows me to understand the grief of their families who feel most deeply the pain and terror experienced by their children, mothers, husbands.

This exercise fills me with a desperate rage about guns—how sinister they are. How their only use is to terrorize, maim, disfigure, and kill. I hate guns with passion. If it were up to me, they would be melted down and made into farm tools, in the spirit of Isaiah the prophet.