A Single Bullet

Lives are precious. Guns end them.

Pax Ahimsa Gethen
3 min readAug 8, 2023

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X-ray image of a bullet lodged in a human skull. Image from the National Museum of Health and Medicine, CC BY 2.0.

Yesterday, I read a story that left me shaking with rage.

On Saturday night, a 43-year-old man in Chicago killed an eight-year-old girl. He complained that she was making too much noise, pointed a gun at her and shot her in the face. The girl, Sarabi Medina, was pronounced dead at the hospital.

I don’t know any details about the gunman or the girl he killed beyond what is written in the above story. And frankly, I don’t need to. There is no excuse for this happening, in any universe I want to live in.

Children should be able to play outside without fear that their lives will be ended in an instant by a gunman’s bullet. This should not be a controversial proposition. But this is not the reality we live in.

Gun rights advocates will blame mental health issues, but refuse to support background checks. Or they will suggest arming even more “good guys” to fight against the “bad guys”.

Gun control advocates will decry easy access to firearms, but continue to let armed police…

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