"Mass shooting"

are words that I never want to hear or read but hear and read far too often.

There was yet another one in the United States over the weekend. That makes around two hundred there this year alone. We are just over a third of the way through the year and they have had two hundred. All those deaths don't even take into consideration the number of people who have died by gunfire in the United States.

Such things are rare here and rare in the United Kingdom. I thought of this as I watched the news last night and saw the enormous crowds of people gathered for the Coronation not just in London but in other places as well. Whether the anti-monarchy "republican" protestors should or should not have been arrested is a matter for debate but there is one thing we can be almost certain of and that is they were not carrying guns. There would have been almost nobody in the crowd carrying a weapon of any sort. 

There will always be people who carry weapons illegally as well as legally in this country and there. Violence doesn't solve problems. It creates problems. The idea that "guns don't kill people" is nonsense. No, of course they don't kill people in themselves. They are inanimate objects. It is the use to which they are put which is the problem, a massive problem. There is the potential for those inanimate objects to do the worst harm of all in the wrong hands. Nobody should believe they need a gun for "protection". 

It was cold last night, not icy cold but cold enough that I snuggled under a lap blanket made by a friend of mine. She made it for the Senior Cat and I have inherited it. Her son was an ambulance officer for many years. Eventually he had to cease work. He could no longer take the trauma he saw so often. The last case he attended did involve violence, great violence and not all of those involved in the "incident" survived. 

It is not just those immediately involved in something like a "mass shooting" who are affected by it. It is the "bystanders" and the "first responders" and the people who have to clear the damage and deal with the long process of "justice" who are affected. There is no "justice" in all of this.

I am so extraordinarily fortunate I live in a place where people do not carry guns by right.