Nevaeh Bravo
Jackie Cazares
Makenna Lee Elrod
Jose Flores
Eliana “Ellie” Garcia
Uziyah Garcia
Amerie Jo Garza
Xavier Lopez
Jayce Luevanos
Tess Marie Mata
Miranda Mathis
Alithia Ramirez
Maite Rodriguez
Annabell Guadalupe
Rodriguez
Alexandria Aniyah Rubio
Layla Salazar
Jailah Nicole Silguero
Eliahana Cruz Torres
Rojelio Torres
All children. Between ages 8 and 10. Gunned down Tuesday at school in Uvalde, Texas.
Irma Garcia and Eva Mireles were two teachers also killed by a gunman on the elementary school campus.
Another mass shooting. Again.
What is left to say?
After all of the thoughts and prayers have been whispered, the angry calls for gun control and the defensive protests that guns are an American right, what is left to say?
“I’m sorry” is pathetic and insulting if a genuine change is not made.
“I give up” is easy—and tempting—but cowardly and irresponsible.
“I told you so” is a hollow, petty claim to prescience.
The Uvalde shooting occurred less than two weeks after 10 people were murdered at a store in Buffalo, New York. The act of another unhinged person with access to guns.
What’s left to do other than clutch your child tightly, grateful that it wasn’t them at that school in Texas? Hold your breath until they come back from class, practice, church group or a dance? Exhale and get ready to do it again the next morning?
Do you go to the market and scout out the exits in case someone decides to start shooting because he doesn’t like Black people? Or Latinos?
Do you regularly look over your shoulder in crowded rooms and venues, assessing potential threats and keeping an eye out for a “crazy person”?
Do you tell yourself what happened in Uvalde and Buffalo and Newton and Columbine and San Ysidro can’t happen in National City or Chula Vista? And hope that you’re right?
I do, too.
It’s not enough.
What do we do?
What’s left to say?
