On Friday morning, a shooter went into a civic association building in a city not far from my hometown and shot and killed over a dozen people, injured several more, and then took his own life. I think I'm in shock, mostly, since even though that's the six largest city in my state, things like this just don't happen here.
I'm sure the people in Columbine and at Virginia Tech and everywhere else horrible things have happened recently thought the same thing.
As if his senseless shooting wasn't bad enough, there are now reports that he was a member of the Taliban, and they are claiming responsibility for the massacre.
The officials have rebuked that claim officially, however, I'm not sure we'll ever know for certain the whys of this. It's possible that he was a member of the terrorist group, who claim there were actually two of them and one fled the scene. Initial news reports claimed there were two or three gunmen, so anything is possible. I'm quite certain if I were the mayor or police chief of such a small city, I'd want to keep any notion that this wasn't a freak, random occurrence by one disgruntled man away from the media and the general population. There's no point in scaring everyone more than they already are- especially if the story can't be confirmed.
Whether he was or was not connected in some way to the Taliban, it's very scary to think that things like this actually do happen here, in our bucolic corner of the world. We like being just a few short hours from a really major city, and having most of the things we need at our fingertips, and yet not having the crime and drugs and worries that being closer would entail.
Then something like this happens, and if it doesn't shatter our view, it's certainly fractures what we thought of as safe. We worry about copycats, we worry that if this man's connection to the Taliban wasn't true, they're claiming it in preparation for another attack, we worry that as more and more people lose their jobs, they are going to feel as if there's nothing else for them to do but resort to violence.
For now, I think people everywhere are shaking their heads and hugging their children as we wait for answers that may never come.
