Gunning For It.

Are you familiar with the Knuffle Bunny books by Mo Willems?  If not, you should familiarize yourself with them.  I am thinking of the specific part in the original book, Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Tale, when Trixie tries desperately to tell her father that she has left her Knuffle Bunny at the laundromat.  Trixie cannot yet talk.  

She expresses her panic through the words "Aggle Flaggle Klabble," and "Snurp."  

"Aggle Flaggle Klabble" and "Snurp" are about all I can come up with right now, too.

Again, today, there was a gun-wielding person where there should not have been--the New Castle County Courthouse in Wilmington, DE.  This is geographically the closest of the shootings in our society's recent past, to where I'm actually living, at about 40 minutes away.

When I got on the computer this morning, I saw news stories timestamped just minutes earlier, so it must have happened right before I checked my e-mail.  I read a little bit more about what happened this afternoon after ER and I returned from a positively lovely playdate.

So, what I'm getting is the "shooter" (I hate that that's a word in everyone's lexicon now), was a man who was scheduled for a custody hearing.  He killed his ex-wife and another woman, and wounded 2 police officers.  

In 2007, the same man, with the assistance of his mother, kidnapped his three daughters who were 5, 4, and 2 at the time, and drove them through Mexico to Nicaragua where he kept them for 19 months.  When found, all of them had fake passports, Social Security cards, etc.  Oh yeah, and the international kidnapping happened just days after this guy took out an illegal home equity loan on his family's home by forging his then-wife's signature, and had $249,000 wired to a bank in New Zealand.  

WTF?

I'm like, Aggle Flaggle Klabble.

Photo courtesy of childrensbookalmanac.com

As I write this, I am tempted to just trash the whole post, because I'm so sick of writing about these horrible things because I've become so jaded about never seeing any real action being taken.  

If you want to talk about taking action, what do you suggest??  Hmmmm?  

That's part of the problem!  I have no suggestions.  I wish I did!!  My snarky, Downton Abbey-lovin', 30-something, generously-sized-self can do absolutely nothing, except wish and hope against hope that someone who has a modicum of influence does something YESTERDAY.

Vice President Biden says there is a sense of urgency in regards to gun control.  "Urgency" is when I have to get to the bathroom or I'm going to have an accident.  When I'm all ready peeing, the "urgency" is long past.  We are currently peeing, people.

Please, someone do something soon, either to strictly regulate the purchase & ownership of guns, or to make people realize that there are other, more creative and healthy ways to solve their problems.  Guns are neither creative nor healthy, and rarely lead to anything that can be described as such.  Now we've got 3 little girls without a mother and a father who will be in prison for (hopefully) the rest of his life.  Not creative.  Not healthy.