Are we safe yet? • Georgia Recorder

Before the recent shooting at Kennesaw State University made headlines, my nineteen-year-old daughter witnessed it. My husband and I were in Austin when she called us sobbing. After assuring us that she was physically fine, she told us about the nightmare that had just unfolded in front of her.

She and her best friend were spending a quiet Saturday afternoon on the ground floor of a campus dorm when they heard several gunshots nearby.

“Mom, people ask, 'Are those gunshots?' » I certainly never heard real gunshots. There is no doubt about them,” she shouted.

Surprised, my daughter and her friend looked out the window and saw a young girl lying on the sidewalk nearby, “blood all over her.” My daughter called 911 and she and her friend ran to get a washcloth and a belt. They could see that the victim's arm had been shot and thought they could help by making a tourniquet for the wound. But the 911 responder told them not to approach the injured girl for fear the shooter was still in the area.

So they looked. As the girl's bloodied body twitched on the sidewalk, they watched helplessly as she bled to death before first responders could reach her. And later, my husband and I listened helplessly, from hundreds of miles away, as our daughter cried and cried and cried.

Today, the parents of this dear young woman who was shot and killed by another angry man with a gun received a much more devastating phone call that Saturday. But hearing about the horror my daughter had witnessed and how it affected her was nonetheless heartbreaking.

The trauma of a nation that lives in the shadow of constant shootings in schools, in movie theaters, in clubs, in concerts, in churches, in hospitals, in libraries, in synagogues, in grocery stores and in office buildings. Shootings aren't enough to convince us to reevaluate our approach to guns. I don't think Americans want to live this way, but there are those of us who are so obsessed with what some might lose that we fail to understand the magnitude of how much we already have lost.

The young woman who was shot on a college campus and left for dead should not have been killed. My daughter and the millions of others like her who have been victims in one way or another of the sudden intrusion of gun violence into their lives should not have to see the same images of blood and death which could be witnessed by soldiers on the field of war. We have transformed our entire public life into a shooting gallery in the name of “security” and “freedom”.

What freedom is this?

Are we safe yet?