She Has a Story

My mother-in-law is sixty-three years old.  She is a barista at Starbucks Coffee where she has worked 30-40-hour work-weeks for over ten years.  Most days, she works the opening shift and arrives at work by 5:30AM to set up and take her position at the cash register, smiling and ready to greet the morning rush.  She is sweet-natured.  "All heart" is how many would describe her.  She has regulars and knows many of her customers by name, and they know her.

My mother-in-law loves working at Starbucks, even though the work is pretty grueling for someone in their sixties.  Ten years ago, the company provided her with a fresh start in life, with terrific benefits, stock options and the chance to spend time with fellow partners who like what they do and believe in the mission statement of the company.  Working at Starbucks allows my mother-in-law to have a variety of relationships and engage her strong work ethic.  She's proud of the work she does and thrilled to share the experience of working at the same company as her son.

Yesterday, half-way around the world, her son woke up on a Sunday morning to learn that a gunman had entered a mall in Maryland.  The gunman walked by the busy Starbucks where his mother was working at the moment,  and then ducked into a shop a few storefronts away where he shot and killed two people (and then himself).  He had a backpack full of homemade explosives.  Doug's mother and co-workers dove into the store's backroom where they barricaded themselves for two hours until the SWAT team found them and escorted them outside.  She was terrified.

It seems as though, as a nation, we're all sitting around, waiting.  Sitting around, waiting for our lives to be touched personally by gun violence.  Most of us know someone, or know someone-who-knows-someone, whose life was taken, or forever altered, due to guns.  Many of us have been the victims of gun violence or can make a serious claim to have narrowly missed being a victim of gun violence.  The degree of separation is ever so slight, and surely this must be altering the well-being of our collective psyche. 

Doug and I were working for Starbucks in downtown Washington, DC on 9/11.  We were the senior people in the office that day, and after making the decision to shut down the office, we helped co-workers find safe places to go.  This wasn't easy.  Roads and highways had been shut down, cell phone and land lines weren't working because of too much activity and, most of all, the news was full of erroneous reports of car bombs, fires, and multiple planes about to crash into the city.  It was impossible to know whether to stay put or try to get home.  In fact, I never went home that day as my house was one mile from the Pentagon where one of the planes crashed. The sense of terror for everyone was at once immediate and also distant, secondary to the known tragedy happening in New York City.

Of course 9/11 is not about guns, but it speaks to the odd mix of apprehension and acceptance that ordinary Americans seem to feel about tragedy--that it's just a matter of time before the next one occurs.  Why aren't we trying to prevent the ones that are preventable?  For layered one on top of the other, these events mess with our hearts and minds; we become simultaneously immune to them and full of dread.

About a year after 9/11, snipers wreaked havoc on the the Washington, DC area.  Over the course of three long weeks, two men (one a minor) shot and killed ten people and critically injured three others.  Before starting the shooting rampage in DC, the snipers killed thirteen other people as the moved across the country toward DC.  They targeted people in locations where they did their daily-routine activities, such as bus stops, gas stations, shopping centers.  They seemed to be targeting suburban DC, so as more and more people were shot and killed, many of us started doing our errands in the city.  It sounds silly, but we were scared.  The seventh person killed was shot dead in the parking lot of a Home Depot, at the Home Depot down the street from my home and where I had shopped just hours earlier.  Again, immediate but distant.  For the psyche, it registers like a narrow miss--no matter how level-headed one tries to be.  The next night, I sat on a barricaded highway for five hours, just two exits from my destination, after another person was shot and killed by a sniper in the vicinity.

The 2002 sniper incident faded from public memory as new ones took place, and for the DC area, this was especially true following the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007--another shooting rampage in which thirty-two people were killed.

All of the victims had a story, and so do their families.  Doug's mom has a life story, and now she has a traumatic event to add to it.  It is of great concern to me that the investigation of the mall shooting and the killer will center on whether he knew his victims, whether this was a domestic dispute, love triangle or small-scale personal vendetta.  Yes, these are important facts, but they will ultimately be used by various spokespersons to assert that the motive of the gunman was limited and specific and that he didn't intend to do large-scale harm . . . as if to say, these little squabbles are simply going to happen from time to time, and that we can't restrict gun ownership because of these one-off situations.  Or, the investigation will find him to have had a history of mental health issues, to which the spokespersons will say the mental healthcare industry is to blame and/or dismiss the entire incident because the killer was "just crazy." 

But shooting deaths, particularly in public places, have picked up in frequency and are practically commonplace nowadays. We all must admit that we are less shocked by each new incident than we used to be.  The issue isn't just about mental healthcare, it's also about the type of guns available, and the ease with which most people can get a gun.  Until we can move away from creating a story about the killers to justify guns, and start remembering the stories of victims of gun violence, their families and those who witness and live through these events, we will inevitably stay intrenched in a strange battle over gun control that pits mental health against weapons, rather than taking a more subtle, partnering, multi-pronged approach.  I have been regularly engaged in the debate, signing petitions and advocating for stricter gun control laws.  But the issue feels so stalled and out of the control of ordinary citizens. It's hard to see the path.  I'm horrified that Doug's mom, grandmother to our children, spent two hours on Saturday crouched in a back room in real fear for her life.  It's simply not okay.