We recalled “the good ole days” when kids who had a beef with each other fought it out – by hand. They exchanged punches and bruises, exhausted themselves, made up, and shortly were friends again. They lived to fight another day, and as years passed, looked back on the disagreement and laughed about it as a learning experience.
In my upcoming interview with Pastor James Lawson and Bryan Stevenson for KCET, Lawson talks about how some people “have allowed their humanity to become deformed.” I’ve been thinking a lot about our attachment to weapons that kill innocent people.
Gun violence spiked across the country in 2020, the most violent year in decades. 19,000 were killed in shootings, the highest death toll in 20 years (and that does not include gun suicides). Mass shootings — defined as four or more shot in an incident — also rose drastically to over 600.