Guns…this should not happen
I got an email from a Wesleyan graduate about Pedro Venture, who graduated from Wesleyan in 2010. I did not know him but all of our kids went to Wesleyan so it wasn’t surprising to get the email.
The graduate reached out because Pedro was attending a wedding in North Carolina. He was at a bar celebrating the night before when a stranger opened fire. This has become normal because years ago I would have read about it but this did not even make my media feed. Pedro was hit in the back of his neck, the only person sustaining any serious injury. He is now paralyzed from the shoulders down with a full spinal cord injury.
Pedro is in for an incredibly long, difficult and expensive journey to rebuild his life. This shouldn’t happen. We shouldn’t have to be worried about attending a wedding, going to a graduation, seeing a movie or walking down the street with a fear of someone opening fire. How did we get here? The amplification of fear has created a gun culture that makes us more unsafe.
If you are able, Please please visit the link below and donate:
GoFundMe: https://www.gofundme.com/f/hope-for-pedro
Comments (Archived):
Unrelated to this I asked the girl who cuts my hair what she thought about EZRA today. She said immediately ‘I would definitely do this’. But only if covered by insurance ‘I would have no way to pay for that’. She didn’t care about any downside, drawbacks, incidental findings etc.
Hope we get there one day.
Terrible. He’s young. Hopefully they’ll be a medical breakthrough in due course. Fingers crossed for everyone in need of this.
There are so many things the United States has worked tirelessly to make safer. Cars and toys and machinery. Houses and jobs. But somehow we are unable to protect ourselves and loved ones from gun violence. We can safety-proof our house when we have an rambunctious toddler, but we can’t stop them from being gunned down in a kindergarten.I am sorry to hear about your classmate. It shouldn’t happen. His rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness were all taken away from him by a single bullet to the neck.
His rights were def taken away
.I grew up around guns. My father was a professional soldier who used guns to kill Nazis. My mother was in the Army. Guns and ammunition were always locked up and where I could never find them.I was trained from an early age to use guns safely. I was trained at military school to use guns. I served in the Army. I used guns to do good things. I shoot fairly regularly. I used to hunt quite a bit.Twice in my life, I have used a weapon in a civilian environment to prevent something bad. Both times, nobody was injured. I was judicious in the manner in which I used the weapon. I had judgment born of training. I was unafraid to use the gun, but I knew what I was doing.It is not the gun. It is the man on its handle.We can do a lot to make the environment better starting with actually completing the targeted list of persons in the USA who should not own guns. This was part of the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban. This list was done by many states, including mine, Texas. Texas uses its list as part of its mandated background checks.The list was opposed by entities like the ACLU and the State of California.This is a good first step. If we can reason to this together, we can have an impact. I am in favor of gun registration. I am favor of universal background checks. I am in favor of monitoring the transfer of guns like cars. I am in favor of Big Data monitoring of excessive gun and ammo purchases. I am an NRA member and I encourage NRA gun safety training.I do not trust the left. I do not trust gun confiscating politicians.I want all sides to agree on the actual gun crime data — real data to guide decisionmaking, not emotional hyperbole that is not fact based.If one is like Beto and is coming for MY gun, to take it, then you will make reasonable people like me into enemies and all of my energy will be on the opposite side.We can be allies or we can be enemies. The choice is up to the left. Gun confiscation is never going to happen in this country. Gun regulation, that will save lives, can happen if we reason together.We have to get the guns out of the hands of criminals, and we have to impose stiff penalties on criminals who use guns during the commission of crimes.JLMwww.themusingsofthebigredca…
Their is no rationale for ownership of guns even if there were only the slightest connection to tragedies like this.Bad arguments vociferously yelled excuses for nothing.
Done. Have never done a gofundme, but feeling powerless in this political climate and want to help.