Daily Prompt
Sparkling or Still
What’s your idea of a perfect day off: one during which you can quietly relax, doing nothing, or one with one fun activity lined up after the other? Tell us how you’d spend your time.
Well, I don’t know. Every day is day off from sanity, it seems to me.
On Thursday, a man opened fire at Florida State University, wounding three people before he was gunned down by five police officers.
But the truly bizarre aspect for me was that that wasn’t the story. The story was that one potential victim was saved by God in the form of The Oxford Context of Wyclif’s Thought, a book he’d just borrowed for his religious studies course and stowed in his backpack, where it stopped a bullet on its very last page.
What’s more the shooting itself was apparently no big deal, being, according to the Police Chief, an “isolated incident with one person acting alone”. Which presumably makes it OK.
And you wonder why it worries me that my son is currently wandering around LA with no handy copy of Wyclif’s Thought protecting his back.
I’m sure you can come up with a multitude of reasons why my son is unlikely to be shot. But you see, to someone outside the US, the very fact that you have those reassurances at your fingertips is not reassuring.
Your gun laws are none of my business. Fair enough. But just for a minute, see it from the outsider’s perspective.
When a young man opened fire in a university library, the newsworthy fact was not that it happened, but that one bullet was stopped by a book.
I don’t know what that says to you, but what it says to me is that I’ll have a day off worrying about guns and bullets when my son gets home again.
http://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/still-or-sparkling/
helen meikle's scribblefest 
Nicely put. I do hope your son arrives home safely and that you can relax again!
Anything else would be unthinkable!
nice one-
regards,
http://YourWellWisherProgram.wordpress.com
Thank you 🙂
London is getting that way, not to mention crazy virgin obsessed wannabe jihadists wanting to chop another persons head off for their 15 minutes of notoriety/fame. It’s a dangerous world out there. Trouble is only us crazies are aware of this most of the time!
I guess only us crazies know ‘It will never happen to me’ is a myth.
Yeah, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to getcha! I don’t classify you as crazy though Helen as you always make a whole lot of sense to mex
Oh I’m definitely crazy! The only reason I appear sane is that I know how crazy I am.
You’re absolutely right, Helen, the news story was fairly secondary. It wasn’t a massacre, after all. I feel so strongly about all of this that I could launch into a tirade right here and now but will spare you. Totally off the subject, I see that “Six Weeks…” is now available on Kindle? That is fantastic news. A friend wants to read it but couldn’t figure out how to get it from Smashwords onto her device. This will make it so much easier!
I’ll join your tirade any day! Might not be my business – but it’s still madness!
Yep, SWiS has always been on Kindle as well. I need to market it. And maybe I would if I knew how…
When a young man opened fire in a university library, the newsworthy fact was not that it happened, but that one bullet was stopped by a book
I find the fact that the one bullet was stopped to be reported as typical of the media — and the fact it is none proves the story about the shooting to be news worthy. I don’t know where you are from but here in the states it was extensively covered on the television, on the internet, in the print and on the radio.
In fact, the very nature of the reporting should be reassuring; the media only covers the rare events. Thousands of people get involved in auto collisions; many seriously hurt or injured and few make the news. Millions of people are victims of violent crime and only a few make the news.
Shootings, despite the media blitz around them, are still very rare.
Bob S.
I think we’ll have to agree to disagree. In 2011, 32,000 Americans died of gunshot wounds – that’s 10.3 people per 100,000 – and a further 73,000 were injured. In the same period in Australia, the figure was 0.86 deaths per 100,000. It’s estimated that by 2015, deaths by gunshot in America will outnumber deaths in road accidents.