Make a change

Published 8:32 am Wednesday, August 7, 2019

On Sunday, when Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine was addressing a vigil about the Dayton shooting that had happened just hours before in an arts district that killed nine and injured 26, a chant started.

“Do something.”

“Make a change.”

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These were not the chants of anti-gun activists. It was a chant of the frustrated.

This was a crowd tired of hearing, day after day, about people getting killed while just doing ordinary things like shopping, going to school, attending a concert or going to work. This crowd just happened for once to have the ear of a high-ranking elected official.

The Ohio shooting happened just 13 hours after a mass shooting at an El Paso, Texas Walmart. Twenty people died, including a mother protecting her baby.

It comes a week after a mass shooting at California’s Gilroy Garlic Festival. Three were killed, including a six-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl.

The crowd’s chant is a call for action… of some type.

There is no easy answer to the problem of mass shootings because there is no single cause when a person, usually a male, decides to get weapons and then open fire indiscriminately on a crowd of people. Sometimes it’s personal, sometimes it’s political, but most of the time the reasons only make sense to the shooter.

We call on the legislators to figure something out.

Attack the issue on many levels because it is a complex issue. People have a Constitutional right to bear arms, but they do not have the right to kill.

There is no single way to solve the problem of mass shootings, but there has to be some way to slow them down.

Do something.