Shootings anywhere should hit hard

If I need a friend to call or text, all I need to do is cook a complicated lunch. Only when I need to take Pot A down to medium high, Pot B off the heat altogether and add one-third of Mixing Bowl 2 to Mixing Bowl 1 will that message come.

Like clockwork, a text alert. He asked if I was doing OK after the Capital Gazette incident, where five newspaper employees were killed in Annapolis, Maryland on Thursday, allegedly by a man who didn’t think the newspaper fairly covered his stalking conviction.

I understand why this should hit me harder than other shootings, because it happened to people in the same profession I’ve held for the better part of two decades.

I don’t think I live in a war zone. Most people I run into are glad to see me there documenting the things they care about (even if the only thing they talk about was my absence at the previous thing they cared about).

Are there people out there with all-consuming vendettas against me? I doubt it, but we get our share of head-scratching complaints to go with the legitimate ones we try to fix.

I don’t live in constant fear that I’m going to get ambushed while on assignment or in the office, and neither do the majority of journalists, But ask, “Would any community member snap and come into your office firing?” I, and just about any other journalist, would have at least one specific person in mind, and we had the answer in the back of our minds before Thursday.

I also realize our technology, and our inherent belief we’re right, means we put ourselves in information silos. And there are plenty of silos where the president calls journalists the enemy of the people, a gun lobby spokesperson imagines curb-stomping journalists, a professional speaker says he can’t wait for “vigilante squads to start gunning journalists down on sight,” and nobody provides a counter argument.

But it didn’t hit harder. It hit as hard as when somebody opened fire in a library I walk to twice a month for city commission meetings and killed two librarians without any discernible motive.

It hits as hard whenever there’s a school shooting. I was once a high school student who thought pulling that D to a B was stressful, and then I hear a Santa Fe, Texas student say she just assumed her school would have an active shooter someday.

Most shootings hit hard, because I can usually find something in common with the victims. In the last month, I’ve gone to concerts, churches, schools, stores and movie theaters — all places some madman visited with a gun. Why did a shooter show up at their place, and will a shooter find his way to my place? And afterwards, will somebody who never met me eulogize me and the other victims with, “Why didn’t any of them have a gun?”

Some of these tragedies may be closer to us for some tangential reason, but shouldn’t they all hit close to home? We’re all Americans, and we shouldn’t be gunned down by other Americans.

My thumbs didn’t have the energy to type all of that, so I responded I was doing fine, and thanked him for his concern. And then I had lunch. I wasn’t really sure what else to do. Yes, that hit me hard too.

Kevin Wilson is managing editor of The Eastern New Mexico News. Contact him at:

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