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Karen Spears Zacharias

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Elliot Rodger’s Right

Elliot Rodger’s Right

Last updated on: May 29, 2014 at 12:39 am by Karen Spears Zacharias

Elliot Rodger’s Right 2014-05-29T00:39:53+00:00 Karen Spears Zacharias

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I have been sitting here in silence.

Silence broken by birds chirping, dogs barking and this loud bursting of fireworks going off in my head. Behind the veil of gray matter, beauty and terror reside, a couple at cross-hairs. One chillingly silent in the presence of the other’s fevered shouting.

I was only away three days. Out on Friday, back on Monday. Time Traveling via Delta Airlines. The world I flew away from is the not the world to which I returned.

Or maybe it is exactly the same.

And that, that right there is bothering me.

Your dead kids don’t trump my Constitutional rights, said the man whose legacy is one only the misguided would aspire to.

Children are dead.

Dying.

And nothing changes.

Locked and loaded, Elliot Rodger lived out his vision, gleefully, triumphantly.

So what is there left to say?

What argument will persuade when the sight of children lying in bloodied heaps doesn’t dissuade?

How many bullet-ridden children will be enough, cries the father of one, the one dead now.

The answer, of course, explodes all around us.

All of them.

The price for this so-called freedom is children rendered dead, past and present and those yet-to-be slaughtered.

So I sit in silence.

Mourning

The children whose names I know only through the headlines reporting their last moments

Huddled in a classroom

Fleeing to a darkened bathroom

Crawling through a convenience store aisle.

And I am left to wonder about the next child fated to die at the hands of a killer whose right to bear arms trumps

The sanity in us all.

It is foolish to argue with fools.

The only thing that changes are the names of the children and the shooter who slayed them.

Karen Spears Zacharias is author of Mother of Rain (Mercer University Press).

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