Here I Stand--I Can Do No Other

After spending half the day hauling seventeen crates of Christmas decorations out of the garage, Fio had to drive over to the Tax Assessor-Collector's office to submit the final paper that would transfer ownership of Husband's car to her name. Sitting in a crowded room for an hour twiddling her thumbs before her name was called did not put her in a good mood, but the breaking point was when, as she left the office, she was approached by two young men with big smiles on their faces who wanted her to sign a petition regarding their "Second Amendment" rights.
     Fiorella blew up. First, she gave them a well-deserved lecture, informing them that Second Amendment gun rights applied to well-regulated militias, not to just anyone who took a hankering to having a gun in the house. Then she hit them with her own story, the one that has haunted her life for almost fifty years--the University of Texas Tower massacre.
     People can't argue someone else's story so the twosome had to listen to Fio's, and I made sure that every passer-by heard it too.
     The long and short of it is that one sunny summer day, a lone gunman went up into the UT Tower, killing a guard and four-member  family on the way, and then, from the highest vantage point, cut loose at everyone he could see on and off campus.
     Among the twenty-some dead was Fio's nephew, Paul Sonntag, age eighteen. From a block away, he'd been shot through the mouth.
     The family was stunned--old men die, not newly-minted high school grads on their way to college in the fall.
     Friends, including Lyndon Johnson, offered consolations and the funeral was well-attended, but that didn't change anything. Paul was dead, and the family has lived in a shadow ever since, even down to the third generation.  You think you've packed the horror away in a dark closet, but every now and then, the guilt for still being alive breaks out, then the anger. Paul didn't have to die, and neither did any of the people who've been killed since then at outdoor concerts, in their offices, in churches, schools, and department stores.
     No, Fiorella will not sign a petition supporting "Second Amendment rights," and neither should anybody else. The blood will be on your hands.