He Said There Was No Sound

At the completion of this piece, there had been 50,219 gun-related incidents in the year 2015. 12,717 of those ended in death. The definition of a mass shooting is disputed by multiple sources as different things. Some sources (typically those that argue for less strict gun control laws) inflate the definition of a mass shooting at 4 or more victims (victims as defined by fatalities), while other sources define victims as injuries and fatalities. Regardless of these statistics, mass shootings in America have plagued our schools so much so that you cannot go a week without hearing about a mass shooting in a school on the media. President Obama who has been outspoken in regards to this subject has said, “Somehow this has become routine. The reporting is routine. My response here at this podium ends up being routine. The conversation in the aftermath of it. We've become numb to this.” Beyond all this talk about gun control, something that we rarely talk about is victims who get injured or who witness these atrocities. The PTSD that occurs is something that is hard to report on because by the time these victims have a chance to breathe after a couple of days, another mass shooting has most likely occurred and the media has moved on to a new city, but these victims do not move on. They can’t move on. Their best friends are being murdered in front of their eyes. Soldiers who have been conditioned to see violence experience PTSD, but average civilians with no training are just thought to sit there and move on? This is horrifying. This piece explores these concepts of moving on. It’s a distant memory. The event occurs so quickly that it is as if I never heard a sound. One victim said these words in an interview with a journalist, which broke my heart. This piece was commissioned by the Rogue Trio based in Tempe, AZ. They asked me to write something af- ter being affected by shooting in Flagstaff, AZ but wanted it to be about the victims, not the shooter or the political implications. Now in 2022, the amount of gun violence events has not become better, and the politics of the day have made it even more mind numbing to see these tragedies happen. The political inaction of our government has made this a political problem, so while the piece is not political, my reflection 7 years later is one of disgust. This piece, explores anger, sadness, and contempt for the lives that those in favor of loser gun control have 100’s of thousands of deaths on their hands. This is their fault.