I try to avoid scanning the headlines during the day. It breaks my concentration and makes it difficult to get my head back in the writing game. But when my RSS reader spat out news of the shooting at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, I couldn’t maintain focus on what I had been working on.

I’ll apologize in advance if I claim to not understand how gun culture works, how it seems to weave its way into the very fabric of an otherwise great nation, or how the “right to bear arms” argument – which made a whole lot of sense in an age when you hunted and fought real enemies and couldn’t just pick up an order at Whole Foods – has been perverted as it has.

Maybe I’m too Canadian. Maybe I’m too much of an artsy wimp who clings idealistically to an unshakable belief in the power of the pen. Whatever, when someone – an 80-something white supremacist, no less – walks into a museum, a Holocaust museum, at that, and opens fire, it becomes plainly obvious that there’s a higher-order issue at play here.

I’ll spare you my perspectives on the Holocaust. I’m a Jew who was raised with the phrase “Never Again” ringing in my ears. My wife and I are raising our children with similar lessons and messages, because it’s never been easy growing up as a minority amid those who would just as soon roll over you for being different. I simply can’t understand how a place designed to educate current and future generations, to reach across the misunderstandings that incubate the kind of hatred that spawned the Holocaust, itself becomes a place of wanton violence.

I’m sure I’m not alone in praying for the victims of today’s shooting. And I’ll keep praying that somehow a nation that got it wrong in the gun department figures out a way to turn the tide.

Source: http://writteninc.blogspot.com

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