Our community is hurting. This morning, right as students were getting to school and heading to class, a classmate opened fire at Marshall County High School. It doesn’t appear that it mattered to him who he shot, he was just shooting. Right now it’s been said that two are dead and a dozen more shot. Five or more have been hurt in the chaos that surrounded the incident. Police took a 15 year old boy into custody. Fifteen. He is not even old enough to drive himself to school.
I struggle with the injustice that is mass-shooting. There are so many out there who are going to say that our gun laws need to be changed. Maybe they are right. But I have come to the conclusion that things are not going to change just because of laws. What needs to change are hearts. At what point in time did this boy’s heart harden and he made the decision to take a gun to school? And at what point did he decide to shoot that gun? And at what point did he say that it didn’t matter what happened after that?
Did this boy watch violence on TV? Did he watch violence at the movies? Did he spend hours playing video games where he got points for killing? Does the boy even know that killing is wrong? Sure, it’s against the law but more importantly, it goes against everything that our being is. Did this boy know that when he shot that gun that there was no reset button, there was no undoing what he had done? At what point did he decide that was all right to do?
I do think that our country is desensitized. If something comes on TV we don’t think it’s real because there are too many things that happen out there that look real but aren’t. I can remember when the twin towers fell. I had just had surgery and it wasn’t real to me. It was a movie. I mean, it was on TV. It took me several weeks to come to realize that it wasn’t a movie. It was real. And real people were hurt. And lots of real people died. When I heard about this shooting this morning I thought, man, there was a kid who got mad at another kid and he took a gun to school to scare him. There was a shooting earlier this week at another school and that’s what happened there. I mean, I thought someone probably got hurt, and it was bad, but no way would it be as bad as the school shootings of 20 years ago. I was wrong.
And everyone got on the bandwagon. Everyone started asking for prayers on social media and whomever you talked with. It was like we all needed to do something, we just didn’t know what to do. We all changed our profile picture to “Pray for Marshall County”, which was huge because if you’re from Marshall County you bleed orange, if you’re from a competing school you can’t stand that orange. But everyone became orange. Today we were all Marshall County. And that was the case because we all knew someone who went to school there or taught there or had kids that went to school there. Even if we didn’t. We knew someone. Because that school could have been our school. That kid that got shot could have been our kid. And so we prayed.
The national media picked it up. The governor flew in from Frankfort. The FBI, the ATF, the state police, the county sheriff, they were all over the place. There were press conferences. It lit up Facebook and Twitter and SnapChat and I’m sure everything else. All of the local television stations started breaking into local programming. There were reporters stationed all over Benton, KY. And then it stopped. The tweets, and the newsfeeds and the posts starting slowing down. People were talking about the Academy Awards and whatever it was that Trump said, or didn’t say. I don’t think anyone in this area could have forgotten what had happened this morning, it’s just that it had been big news, but the shock had worn off a little, and it was time to get back to Lester Holt in North Korea.
But not in our area of Kentucky. Because most of the people outside of our area won’t take the time to see how we handle this, and even though people are hurting who never thought they would have to deal with something like this, this area of Kentucky has become one voice. And that voice is that yeah, we need some work, and we’re not perfect, but our hearts are together through this. We don’t care if you’re black, white or blue, we are together in this and we will stand beside each other, and take care of each other no matter what.
If we can impress upon our kids why this is so terribly wrong, and if we can change one heart in all of this, one of those hardened hearts, then we have made our area of Kentucky, and our world a much better place to be. #MarshallStrong
