USM Chancellor Jay A. Perman on the Robb Elementary School Shooting
Baltimore, Md. (May 25, 2022) – I don’t have any words to express my heartbreak over the people—mostly children—gunned down in Uvalde, Texas.
But I do have words to express my anger.
I’m angry that when I began writing this statement, my first thought was to consider what I’d written after Stoneman Douglas High School, after Sandy Hook Elementary. What I’d written, if anything, after Orlando, and Pittsburgh, and Charleston, and Las Vegas, and Sutherland Springs, and Boulder, and Louisville, and Oak Creek, and El Paso, and towns all across America whose names we don’t remember anymore because the casualties just keep coming and coming.
I’m angry that Buffalo is still burying their dead, and that all those mourning in churches and by gravesites this week will see their grief buried under this even fresher grief.
I’m angry that last year in Baltimore, where I live and work, 293 people died by gun violence. And I’m angry that not one of them made the national news.
I’m angry that a public health crisis of this magnitude is met with a stunning, maddening refusal not only to solve it, but even to admit it exists.
I’m angry that, at this moment in time, we seem so very comfortable with death that comes at the end of a gun barrel.
It shouldn’t take courage to stop this slaughter. It shouldn’t take political capital. It should take compassion. And if not that, then at least common sense.
This carnage will not end if we don’t care enough to end it. And I don’t think we do. But today, as I pray for the loved ones of all those lost in Uvalde, Texas, I’ll also pray that this country eventually proves me wrong.
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Contact: Mike Lurie
Phone: 301.445.2719
Email: mlurie@usmd.edu
