One Billion

Last week the jackpot in the Mega-Millions lotto topped one billion dollars.

One billion.

That’s a thousand times a million.

To give you some perspective (and I think we all need to gain some perspective on occasion), at the rate of pay I was earning as a high school teacher, I made a million dollars every twelve years. Roughly, in twenty-seven years of teaching, I made (and spent—trust me) two and a quarter million dollars.

But in order to make a billion dollars, I would have had to work a thousand times that long. Yep. If I’d kept working, I would have made a cool billion dollars after twelve thousand years (give or take a few hundred years).

Makes me tired just thinking about it, though I’m sure I would have enjoyed spending that much time with my students—kids who were kind, smart, funny, compassionate, and always entertaining. Sweet kids. Innocent kids.

It also makes me think, now that I’m living on my pension (and not earning much from my writing—I mean, you’re currently reading my words for freeee!) that perhaps I might have chosen a more lucrative line of employment.

Take gun sales, for example. Know how long it took gun manufacturers in the U.S. to earn a billion dollars? Ten years. Oh wait—they made much, much more than a billion in ten years. That’s just what they made on assault-style weapons. You know, AR-15s and such. Those sales alone earned them a cool billion dollars. In ten years.

Don’t you wonder what they do with all that money? I do. I’d like to think they put a few million aside to pay medical bills and PTSD counseling and grief therapy and renovations of the crime scene whenever there’s a mass shooting. I’d like to think that, all right. But I can’t. Because they don’t.

Ever wonder who pays the medical bills for victims of mass shootings? They do. The victims, I mean. Well, their insurance companies, but as we know, insurance companies only pay for certain things these days. “Out of pocket” expenses can be astronomical. Especially when you’ve been hit by multiple rounds that basically explode inside your body. (CNN has a non-graphic simulation video posted on YouTube of how the round from an AR-15 affects human tissue. You can view that by clicking here.)

Curious, I did a search of “mass shooting” on the Gofundme.com page. There are hundreds and hundreds of accounts set up to help victims. Because, as I said, if you’re hit but don’t die, you’re going to need really good insurance coverage.

Because gun manufacturers are using their billion dollars for other things.

Look, I know I’ve been harping on this issue for months. Is it too much?

Could it ever be “too much” as long as mass shootings are still happening?

Am I “one of those Dems” who want to “take all the guns away”? No. No, I am most decidedly not. I believe the founding fathers had good reason to say everyone who wants to have a gun at home should have the right to do so. I have no issue with the handgun my nearly-ninety-year-old neighbor is ready to bring out should civil unrest rear its ugly head here in our senior community. I have no issue with a single friend who keeps a gun in her nightstand in case her abusive ex-husband decides to come at her again. I certainly have no issue with my brother’s hunting rifles because he hunts deer humanely, and he eats what he kills (and anyway, most of the time he just has fun camping out with his friends and doesn’t bag anything).

But if we have any chance of stopping the type of carnage we have seen in recent months and years, we have to do something.

How about we reinstitute the ban on assault-style weapons? Because you know, they were banned for years. And the percentage of these types of mass shootings dropped dramatically. And in those years that they were banned, my brother continued hunting and neither my friend or my neighbor felt unsafe without their handguns.

I do have one friend who owns an AR-15 and feels threatened by any conversation involving gun control reform. He uses his AR-15 to hunt coyotes. So he can kill an entire pack at one time.

So yeah, I wouldn’t mind if we passed a law saying he can’t do that.

Mostly, though, I’m more focused on no more children dying deaths so violent, their parents have to give samples of their DNA in order to identify their bodies.

Give it some thought. Maybe call or write a senator. Or vote for only those individuals who sincerely support gun control reform. Please.

Because this:

And because this is a reminder of how quickly we forget:

 

Oh, by the way, we know now that someone in Illinois won that billion-plus Mega Millions jackpot. Wouldn’t it be cool if it were someone in Highland Park? Yeah, I think so, too.

The lie all mothers tell

 

I’ve been working on a post about something that happened when I was hiking in Oak Glen last weekend. But then the shooting happened at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, and I haven’t wanted to finish that. Because I’ve been thinking about this:

Bear with me. It’s a story.

When my kids were little, I loved that I could stay home. I did my writing when they were at school or sleeping, and I was there when they came home, hot or tired or rain-soaked or weepy or jubilant.

After my divorce, I had to go back to school full time in order to get my degree and start teaching. I tried to plan all my classes so that I could get the kids to school, get to campus for classes, then get back home before they did. But the university was far from home, and putting that much distance between myself and my children cranked my anxiety level way up. I will confess that there were some days I sat in my car in the parking lot after I arrived on campus, reluctant to give my attention fully to the day’s classes when my children were nearly an hour’s drive away. Keep in mind, this was in the days before cell phones. If something had happened to one of my kids while I was in class, someone would have a difficult if not impossible time reaching me. I had no family members, no support network living nearby. There were times when I had to fight the urge to turn around and go home just to be there. Just in case.

In those times, I calmed myself with self-talk that went something like this: The kids are okay. They’re all in school. They are protected, and they will be safe there until you pick them up.

Think of that in light of the danger kids face all over the nation in schools today.

My children are grown now, and for the most part, their children are, too; I have only one grandchild in elementary school. He lives in Arizona, another state that, like Texas, has very few restrictions regarding the sale and ownership of firearms. He’ll be ten in October, the same age as most of the children in the Robb Elementary School massacre. I have another decade or so to worry about his safety.

My daughter and her husband both teach high school here in Southern California. While our state has much more restrictive gun laws than Arizona (another reason to love Cali), that didn’t stop a student in 2019 from pulling a semi-automatic handgun out of his backpack and shooting five people at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, a quiet community much like the area where my daughter and her husband teach. Of course there have been other school shootings in California as well.

While I watched news coverage in the aftermath of the Robb Elementary School shooting, I just kept thinking of all the moms. All the mothers in Uvalde who sent their children to school that morning and told themselves the lie all mothers have to tell themselves now, regardless of where they live in this country: My children will be safe at school. Bad things don’t happen here. Not in our town. Not to our kids.