I couldn't even think of a title for this post. I just feel sick inside tonight. There was a shooting at a local mall today and 9 people died, including the "shooter". I know things like this happen everywhere. I know that our society (in my opinion) has grown more violent and you read about these things in the paper or on the internet all the time, but violence like this has never been this close to me. It scares me. As far as I know, I don't know any of the people directly involved, but the police haven't released the names of any of the victims, only the gunman. However, my niece called me tonight and told me that one of the victims goes to her church and she had been a friend of my nephew-in-law's family for years. This woman has worked at Von Maur for years in the customer service department, doing gift wrapping, a very nice, God-fearing, friendly, woman who loved her husband and her family. She had children and grandchildren. And tonight she's dead because some idiot wanted to be infamous. I'm not even going to give his name. It's all over the news already and I'm not going to help with his quest to become infamous. Bastard. I didn't know what to tell my niece when she asked why this woman had to die this way. Why did somebody's grandmother who loved making presents look beautiful for special occasions have to die by taking a bullet to the head? What do I say? I don't know. I hope she never saw it coming. I hope the last minutes (seconds) of her life weren't spent being paralyzed in fear. I hope she never knew what hit her. I just feel sick. My heart feels sick that one human being could do this to another. I remember one time when I was about 20 or so and I read an article about how police officers doing traffic stops were more likely to be killed than than blah, blah, blah. I don't even remember the rest of the article because it scared the crap out of me. My dad was a cop (most of the time working on the interstate - making traffic stops) my entire life. I seriously had never thought until that day that my dad actually had a job where he might not come home every night. What an idiot I was. It was brought home to me again years later when I worked in narcotics and the officers I worked with executed a search warrant one night and when they came back they told me about the paraplegic man who had a sawed off shotgun in bed with him, and I realized how lucky I was to see everyone come back at the end of the shift. Who can imagine that you have a job gift wrapping presents and you leave for work one morning and don't come back because some jackass with an assault rifle is angry because he got fired from McDonald's and wants to be famous? You can go on and on about gun control, second amendment rights, concealed carry laws, God's plan, mall security, how bad things, happen to good people, why, why, why... but it doesn't change a darn thing. And my heart still hurts.