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A Pandemic of Violence

Question today is, how many people need to die?

After the Garlic festival shooting, I posted Numb to Violence and then in the last week, we had two more shootings. So what?

It appears that no one expects anything significant to happen — to change our United States pandemic of violence. And, lucky for Congress, they have the month of August-plus off, and thus, are not in session.

When the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting happened, where 26 people died, including 20, 6-7-year-old children were killed, and nothing happened to radically change the gun culture or ban assault weapons or large-capacity ammunition magazines — I knew nothing was going to change.

There is even a conspiracy theory out there that the entire Sandy Hook shooting scene and story didn't happen, it was all faked — just like the moon landing 50 years ago.

Usually I say that people must die before change happens. In the case of gun violence and mass shootings, instead of a statement, I think the question is "How many people must die?" before our legislators at all levels of government have the guts to act.

Until that happens, order up more coffins, grieving families and communities, shattered lives, outraged citizens and guns and ammo. Other nations don't understand us, and it appears that we don't want to understand or act ourselves.

Eric Holdeman is a contributing writer for Emergency Management magazine and is the former director of the King County, Wash., Office of Emergency Management.