First day, first murder
January 2, 2011
Calgary, Alberta, Canada: Home
The newspaper headline today stunned me: fatal shooting at 1 a.m. last night.
It happened downtown, 3rd and 3rd, which is near the Old Spaghetti Factory and the Westin.
I used to work in one of the buildings near there. Got my hair cut in another, went for lunch about once a week in a third, and dinner twice a week when working overtime, in a fourth. Not at 1 a.m., granted, but I don’t want to rely on just a gap of six hours or so as my protection against the next senseless shooting.
We cannot ever get complacent about violence in our city. Whether it’s criminals shooting each other or not, violence and especially violence involving guns, is something we must be outraged about.
Canada is still a safe place. Calgary is still a safe place. But we have to make a big deal out of every gun murder, every act of violence involving a gun, and every criminal act involving a gun. These cannot become mere statistics. One is too many.
Guns and gun crime are not new but they are still relatively rare. It must stay that way.
Some people like to draw a straight line between a gun crime and whether or not the gun registry was a good idea or not. That is a fruitless debate. It deflects attention from what we all need to be focusing on: how to stop this madness before someone else gets hurt.
It sickens me to think that even one person a year is shot to death in Calgary. I want my fellow Calgarians to feel this same outrage and to never ever become numb to it. Gun violence is not part of our way of life.
And to think, when I woke up this morning I was planning a pleasant little blog entry about Love, Actually.
jill