No more.
There have been more mass shootings so far in 2022 than there have been days in the year.
27 alone have been school shootings.
No more.
Today is day 145 of the year, and the country has already experienced 213 mass shootings.
So far.
Two hundred and thirteen such attacks in 21 weeks. This averages out to about 10 a week.
No more thoughts and prayers.
In 2019 when I created this collage entitled “Ending Gun Violence- It’s About Time- Hope and Prayers Aren’t Enough” chronicling all the mass shootings in the U.S. as of that year, I had hoped there would be no more.
I prayed there would be no more.
I thought there would be no more.
There were more.
From Dayton to El Paso there were more. Mass shootings occurred in offices, and high schools, day spas, and supermarkets. Shoppers weren’t even safe in Walmart. The U.S. ended 20021 with 693 mass shootings.
The shootings never stopped.
Hope and Pray Its Ended
I was 14 when I saw this full-page advertisement in the New York Times in July 1969.
It appeared one year after the assassination of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and 6 years after the shooting of President John Kennedy.
The bold headline asked the reader:
Hold onto this page for 1 year and hope and pray it’s ended.
The trouble is hoping and praying isn’t enough. Violence won’t end unless you’re willing to start the ending
I held onto the ad for more than a year hoping the violence would end.
I thought there would be no more.
I hoped there would be no more. I prayed there would be no more.
There was more.
Collage by Sally Edelstein 2019 newspaper, vintage paper, pencil 20″ x 20″
I held onto it for 51 more years until I decided the time was right to use the yellowing paper in an art piece on gun violence.
That somehow after the senseless mass killings in Orlando, Parkland, Las Vegas, and the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh it might have ended. It was, at long last, enough.
That there would be no more.
That we as a nation would do more.
Yet in the wake of hundreds of multiple mass shootings in U.S. history since this ad appeared, the Senate still can’t take small steps to curb gun violence.
“My prayers are with you” congressmen numbingly utter, but in the same breath they greedily whisper “my votes are with the NRA.”
Offering prayers but failing to act, makes their prayers ring hollow.
America can’t take any more.
No more prayers. No more thoughts.
No more inaction.
No more carnage.