Reaction

Random reactions and observations on the Omaha mall massacre:

• One of the guys that was killed, 65 yr. old John McDonald, was shopping with his wife when he was killed. Can you imagine seeing your spouse of several decades bleeding and dying right in front of you?
• I spent all morning today thinking that one of the men that was killed was the father of one of my high school classmates. I went to school with a guy named Ryan Scharf who had red hair. Gary Scharf, one of the customers that was killed, was 48 years old, was from Lincoln, and had red hair. I finally found out this afternoon that it wasn't Ryan's dad, but not before spending the entire morning wondering how one copes with losing his father when he is in his late 20's. My grandpa died the week that my dad graduated from high school. Here I am pushing 30, and I can't even imagine how I would handle losing my dad. How does anyone handle something like that?

  Gary Scharf did have a son, a 19 year old student at UNL. Unbelievable.

• I'm not normally an emotional guy. I find myself sorting through emotions of sorrow, disbelief, and anger when I think about what some teenage jerk did to those people and their families. He could not possibly know or understand how much he was taking from the victims and their families.
• Speaking of victims, Robert Hawkins isn't one. Stay tuned for reports about how he was a good kid, how everyone is completely surprised that he would do this, and that he was a victim of a broken system that didn't give him the help that he needed for his depression and his *gasp* ADHD. I call BS.

  This kid was a cold-blooded murderer. He was a coward who killed women while they worked at and shopped at a store in the mall. He raised his rifle up to his shoulder, looked down the barrel, aimed it at these women, and then pulled the trigger. He didn't just go in Rambo style and start shooting at random (as if that would be much more admirable). If you listen to the 911 calls, you hear the shots are spread out over more than a minute. The shots come in bursts, with delays between them. He was picking his targets. He was a coward.

• The answer to stopping crimes like this isn't to take away everyone's guns. I'm not saying that every man on the street needs a sidearm, but think how things would have been different if someone like Joe Horn had been in Von Maur that day. Hawkins pulls his rifle and squeezes out the first three shots, maybe not even hitting anyone. Seconds later he's on the floor and eight or nine people are still alive.
• The more time I spend on this earth the more I realize that we'd have a lot fewer problems if men would be Men. I'm not asking for the moon, but there are some pretty simple suggestions that would make things run a whole lot smoother around here.

  1) Only have sex with the woman you are married to.
  2) Don't walk out on the woman you are married to.
  3) If you and said woman end up with children, don't walk out on them, either.
  4) Teach said children right from wrong. Teach them to work hard and be responsible.

  That's it. Four little things.

  Instead, our society says we should have sex with anyone we want to. We should walk out of our marriage (if we even bother getting married in the first place) if it gets hard or if the puppy-love feeling wears off. Our society says that paying child support is involvement enough in a child's life. Our society says there is no right from wrong, and parents who try to "force" a belief system on their children are dangerous.

  I say a kid without a dad and without a sense of morality is dangerous.