Dear LREI Community, 
Apologies for the additional communication this week.
Yesterday, on the fifth anniversary of the shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL, as I read about the tragic mass shooting at Michigan State University (MSU) on Monday, I was horrified when I read that a student at MSU was also a student at Sandy Hook Elementary School during the shooting there in 2012 and another MSU student was at Oxford High School, MI in 2021 during a shooting there. This was bound to happen. With so many mass shootings each day, we should not be surprised that some unlucky souls are caught up in more than one such event. More and more of us will begin to know people who have survived these horrendous events, and some who did not. There have been 67 mass shootings thus far this year according to the Gun Violence Archive, which is more days than the number of days so far in 2023!
What to do? A number of years ago I promised to reach out to my elected officials on a regular rotation and urge them to stand up for the lives of our children and I have let that fall away. I think I will start again today. A friend posted something along the lines of the following on their social media feeds – What would happen if the energy we put into stopping our children from getting their hands on books and the energy we put into limiting what they learned about their world went into keeping guns out of the hands of those who mean us harm? I think we will focus our energy, adults, and children, as we do every day, on learning what we need to learn and having the experiences we need to have, in order to create a more peaceful future.
Peace and hope,
Peace and hope,
