The Kentucky and Alabama shootings last weekend affected me deeply. Maybe it was the cumulative effect of so many mass shootings recently, or maybe I finally dropped my defenses enough to truly feel what that loss must be like, but I can’t take this violence and insanity anymore without speaking up. These tragedies keep repeating themselves; the interviews with the distraught parents, the talking heads with their opinions, the politicians up in arms, and then nothing happens.

Firearms recently became the number one cause of death for children and teens. Can we leave the politics out of the debate and start with the goal that no more children need to die? Let’s find solutions that get us there despite the politics.

I am personally taking practical steps toward change by writing this letter, and by wearing a lapel pin that symbolizes peace. As I thought about putting the pin on the first time, I realized I would have to put a hole in my shirt in order to wear it, and how that might damage the shirt. I paused, I thought about the shootings that happened yesterday, just a couple miles from me in Bowdoin and Yarmouth. And then it hit me: The tiny hole I was putting in my shirt was nothing compared to the holes those bullets put in the bodies of our society’s latest victims. Can we please stop the madness?

Gordon Haldeman
Freeport