Editorial: Time to talk about tragedies

There should have been more time.

When the Tree of Life synagogue was attacked with gunfire and 11 people died and more were injured, there should have been more time.

There should have been time to think about what happened.

There should have been time to process it.

There should have been time to grieve.

There should have been time to think about what went wrong. There should have been time to come up with solutions. There should have been time to debate what would help and what would make it worse. There should have been time to investigate and analyze and evaluate.

There should have been more time for people to focus on what happened in Pittsburgh before everything vanished in a puff of gunsmoke and a new horrible tragedy became the poster child for misdirected anger and senseless violence.

But there wasn’t.

It was seven days until a Florida yoga studio was shot up, killing two and wounding five . That was the same day that Rose Malinger, 97 , the oldest victim in the Tree of Life shooting, was laid to rest.

It was five days later when a man shot up a California bar , killing 12, including a police officer and a survivor of the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history — the 2017 Las Vegas country music festival event that killed 58 and injured 851. The California shooting happened the same day officials announced Malinger’s daughter, Andrea Wedner, 61, had been released from the hospital .

It was just 12 days before the Tree of Life shooting was eclipsed.

There should have been more time. We should get to learn from one tragedy before we tumble headlong into the next.

We have to make more time.

We have to do something, anything, everything to make sure that we find a way for people to be safe from war-zone-like gunfire that rips apart schools and worship, movies and dancing, baseball games and workplaces and yoga poses and all of the other places we should be and deserve to be unafraid of death and blood.

We need to stop being defensive of the territory we don’t want to yield on the issue on all sides. Yes, let’s address mental health. Yes, let’s address background checks and where they succeed and where they fail. Yes, let’s talk about it all, openly and honestly and without fear that maybe one side will lose a point and one side will gain one because winning and losing is not what this is about.

Our lives are in the balance. Our kids’ lives. Our parents’ lives. Our grandparents’ lives. We are losing people and it happens far too often, and it happens before we have a chance to find the answers because more shootings happen before we have the discussion, resetting us to a place of anger and tears and hopes and prayers.

We should have had more time. But we don’t. Let’s talk about it.