I am outraged.

Another mass shooting has just occurred, this one in Minnesota.

Two children, an 8-year-old and a 10-year-old, were killed and 17 others were injured inside a church. The shooter’s weapons were an AR15 rifle, a shotgun and a handgun.

We can feel the pain of their families for as long as it takes the TV news to switch to a different story or until our lives must move along into our daily routines. We don’t want to know that since 2023, seven children die each day in this country from gun violence.

Just in that year alone, 2,566 young people from ages 1-17 were murdered by pulled triggers from somewhere in this grand ol’ USA, and that the leading cause of death for American kids is not disease, not accidents, but shells shot from firearms.

We can easily put it out of mind because it’s not our child who bled to death on a classroom floor. It’s not our child who won’t be coming home from school today or not sitting at our kitchen table for dinner. It’s not our child’s bedroom that will remain closed until the parents can fight through their never-ending grief to open the door and clean out closets full of toys or personal items that tell the short stories of their sons and daughters who got in the way of a spray of bullets and will never grow up to earn college degrees, become U.S. soldiers or open small businesses.

These children, their names now nothing more than statistics on a crime sheet to authorities, will never get married, never have kids of their own because an intruder with an AR15 assault rifle took their final breaths away minutes after they might have been laughing at something funny or getting excited about doing something really cool with their friends later that day.

I am outraged. So far in 2025, there have been 57 shootings in K-12 schools in our country, killing 15 and wounding 47 others. The National Rifle Association buys our politicians to protect everyone’s right to bear arms. They honor the Second Amendment, a document that was written 260 years ago when a musket shot a single bullet and had to be reloaded long before the modern invention of the AR15, the gun of choice in mass shootings, a vicious weapon that can fire 45 to 400 rounds per minute with a velocity that propels a lead ball 3,300 feet per second, three times the speed of handgun bullet.

The NRA stands by its policies, and that’s because it’s not one of their children who was murdered by a shooter with a semi-automatic rifle. As a gun owner, I say it cannot be argued that this killing machine is absolutely necessary for public ownership.

While still another group of families grieve over the deaths of their children, our government officials arrest illegal immigrants and tell us they are keeping us safe from harm, but when the next American psycho, most often a white male, leaves puddles of blood on a classroom floor for a custodian to mop in the aftermath from a school massacre of our most innocent and vulnerable citizens, all our government will do is send thoughts and prayers.

For the children who have survived the onslaughts, we must understand their lives will be traumatized forever. They will never be able to unsee what they saw on the day that their friends were gunned down right before their very eyes.

I am outraged because after an Iowa school shooting that ended the life of a sixth grader and wounded several others, President Donald Trump told America: “It’s just horrible, so surprising to see it here, but we have to get over it. We have to move forward.”

As this administration preaches law and order, but cuts programs that had helped the mentally unstable, thousands of children will die this year, slain by the hands of psychotic Americans who are locked and loaded to kill an undeserving enemy that arm themselves with textbooks, prayer books and brown lunch bags holding peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

And still, we do nothing to tighten the laws. Many Asian countries have tough gun restrictions, as do Australia and the United Kingdom, and it is no coincidence that these countries have the fewest deaths by firearms in the world while America has the highest child and teen firearm mortality rate among all the wealthiest countries.

I am outraged because we hear the voices of those who oppose gun control shout every time there is a mass shooting.

They yell, “Guns don’t kill people; people do.”

They say, “I’m afraid the government is going to come and take away my guns.”

“There’s nothing you can do,” they repeat over and over again. “Most of the guns are illegal weapons sold on the streets.”

They shout out because it’s not their kids who were killed or wounded at their desks in a school or in the pews of a church in Texas, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Connecticut, Tennessee, Florida, Arkansas, Michigan, Oregon, Iowa, Louisiana, West Virginia, South Carolina and Wisconsin.

They shout out because their children, their little ballet dancers and their high school football players, are alive and enjoying life, a life that has been extinguished for the young victims of mass shootings who have danced their last dance or played their last game all before they finished elementary school or earned a high school diploma.

We do not want to hear that our own children are not safe from these atrocities in our churches, our schools, our malls and our college campuses. We do not want to worry that at this very moment, a disturbed person who lives somewhere in our neighborhoods might be planning to do the unthinkable.

“No, that could never happen here,” says everyone from everywhere.

Nothing gets done to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally deranged. In the Minnesota case, the killer had posted his vile hatred on social media before committing his deplorable act, and the guns he used were legally purchased. Our lawmakers and leaders of our country don’t do a damn thing to help stop the carnage.

Tell me that I shouldn’t feel outraged. Tell me I shouldn’t worry. Tell me this won’t ever happen here.

Email Rich Strack at richiesadie11@gmail.com