A small bottle ideal for perfumes and scents. Also purple.
I thought the bottle might pair well with my “Bridgerton” coloring book. Based on the Regency romance book series by Julia Quinn, the fourth season of the TV series returns in 2026.
On this page, the anonymous “Lady Whistledown” is making a surreptitious late-night visit to her printer so all the gossip about London society (and a bit of the royal household) can be consumed by anyone with around five cents to spend. (They were free at first, and once the populace was hooked, she began to charge for her sheets.) This coloring page was a big help to me yesterday.
Regarding the rest of today’s post: I don’t think today is necessarily the best place to share this information, but it’s uppermost on my mind and is impacting what I feel like sharing here and how this kind of thing can dominate my thoughts and my days. For example, I can color, because it’s soothing. I can manage my household and my health because I have to. But I can’t write. Writing fiction demands that I tap into a full range of feelings, many of them including conflict.
I can’t watch anything (movies, television) that will have too much emotional impact.
I don’t easily handle small frustrations (yet I STILL feel grateful for all the things that go well and the wonderful parts of my life, because I’ve hardwired myself to do so).
I’m doing what I can to proceed with Christmas (still don’t have a holiday photo for our Christmas cards/letters this year, and still haven’t mailed out the packages I’m running out of time to send).
I need the normalcy of updating here. I need the structure it provides. I’d rather not be thinking about yesterday’s event or letting it affect me, but these tragedies always do and likely always will. I won’t rant. I’ll just provide a graphic and talk about my website. (After a cut, so if a coloring page and a photo of a bottle is what you can handle today, I completely get it. For me personally, the amount of news and social media exposure I’ve cut out since November is necessary for my emotional and mental health.)
They wanted to go to school…the last few days before their Christmas break.
Yesterday, a 15-year-old female student opened fire at Madison, Wisconsin’s Abundant Life Christian School (grades K-12) with a pistol. She killed a fellow student and a teacher and injured six others, two of whom remain in critical, life-threatening condition (as of this writing). She allegedly turned the pistol on herself and died en route to a hospital.
I started “blogging” on LiveJournal in December of 2004–twenty years ago. At some point in the last few years, I decided I’d research public shooting incidents that happened after that date and retroactively make note of them on this site. Why? Because gun reform has been a passion of mine since either my first or second year in college (sometimes I get the years mixed up; it’s been a while). Back then, I researched gun use in deaths from accidental shootings, homicide, and suicide, i.e., not related to public shootings specifically, for a college class in which I had to write a paper taking a pro stance on what was then usually called “gun control.” Over time, I came to understand it as gun reform. My main focus was on gun education and gun safety, and it fully took into account the hunters, gun collecting and target shooting enthusiasts, and guns kept for self-protection of the region where I lived.
The impact of everything I learned during my research has never left me.
I have in no way documented on this site all the incidents of shootings in schools, public places, churches, mosques, and synagogues, retail and entertainment establishments, and workplaces (even since 2005). It’s an ongoing effort, most particularly because it’s important to me to provide the names of those killed and injured (and never the names of the shooters). The fact that I have only 58 posts using the “gun-reform” tag shows I’m far behind. To provide perspective related to school shootings alone, the Columbine massacre took place on April 29, 1999, and there have been more than 400 school shootings since.
The information below is recorded to document the number of shootings and full scope of gun violence on school campuses.
Taken from the Riedman, David (2023) K-12 School Shooting Database, I know it isn’t large enough to see the years and the specific numbers. The graphic remains powerful as indication of an escalating crisis. As the site explains, All shootings at schools… “include when a gun is brandished, is fired, or a bullet hits school property for any reason, regardless of the number of victims, time, or day of the week.” Unlike many other data sources, this information “includes gang shootings, domestic violence, shootings at sports games and after-hours school events, suicides, fights that escalate into shootings, and accidents” all as part of school locations.
I know it’s a cliche, but I just can’t get my head around the culture of guns. I remember you saying about it being a reason not to go to the cinema – or at least check the exits if one does. I simply wouldn’t even know how to get hold of a gun? Shootings happen in all countries, of course, but I don’t think I would survive long in the US!
It’s sad how the world views the U.S. when there’s so much more to the country and its people than how we are at our worst. Choosing guns over the lives of children isn’t what the majority of us want. It’s a matter of who’s noisiest and their false narrative, along with who can be bought in local, state, and federal governments–along with who’s doing the buying.
Absolutely. As you say, it’s the minority who make the most noise. I have seen stats that say that there are more guns than people in the US, but that’s not to say that everyone owns a gun. The movies coming out of Hollywood don’t help that impression.
We have a problem with knife crime of course, though the perpetrators need to get up close and personal, so it doesn’t tend to involve mass deaths or woundings. Doesn’t make it okay, though
I read an article just yesterday of a business (in the U.S.) where a man who’d had a job there for two weeks walked into a meeting and stabbed the company president in the side before running away. He was caught, and the victim remains in “serious but stable condition.” Madness.
It does seem to be getting worse. I don’t know if it really is, or we are simply more likely to hear about nowadays? There have been murmurings about violence becoming normalised for years.