UVALDE, TEXAS - MAY 25: A child crosses under caution tape at Robb Elementary School on May 25, 2022 in Uvalde, Texas. According to reports, during the mass shooting, 19 students and 2 adults were killed, with the gunman fatally shot by law enforcement. (Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

As a former county reporter in northwest Wisconsin, I always tried to find a local angle to a national or regional story.

I’ve been  thinking the two former papers I used to work for – Spooner Advocate and Sawyer County Record – were probably looking for readers who have friends or relatives with some connection to the recent mass shooting Wednesday, Aug. 27, at the Annunciation Catholic Church in South Minneapolis that left two youngsters dead and 21 others injured.

I  Googled the church’s location and realized that I had been just six blocks from it early this spring when I visited the Russian Art Museum. The church is also 10 or 15 minutes north of where my sister, Charlotte, lives.

Later, Charlotte called me and said she and my other sister, Alma, had attended the church for Christmas Eve or New Year’s Eve mass. Charlotte mentioned that a neighbor had a daughter who attended the same pre-K-8 Catholic school as the students who were  fired upon.

Without knowing any victims, just the proximity of the church to my previous visit and my sisters’ and the neighbors’ experience, there is some connection I have with that tragedy, be it ever so thin.

A couple of years ago, when I worked for the Sawyer County Record, I did a story on a woman who works in Hayward whose son had been attending Michigan State University when a man went on a short shooting rampage in February 2023 on campus.

It was after doing that story of the local boy to the Michigan State University shooting, that it hit me that more and more of us are having some connection to a gun shooting, especially school shootings.

We may not have witnessed the shooting, and we hopefully didn’t have any loved one injured or traumatized, but still we might be one or two or three or four persons removed from the tragedy, like the  woman whose son was in proximity to the Michigan State shooter.

It’s just logical with more and more of these mass shootings more of us would have these connections.

There are those directly impacted by mass shootings, the victims and their families, but there are scores more that are indirectly connected, and because of those connections the tragedy has more importance. The event becomes less abstract as you hear about a friend’s daughter or niece or cousin who had to hide under her desk to avoid rounds of gunfire echoing through the halls of education. It becomes less abstract as the mother of the Michigan State University student describes her fear when she heard about the gunman and knew her son might be shot.

After a mass shooting happens, we hear people argue  that it’s not the guns causing the deaths but the shooters, and then others advocate for legislation that would keep guns out of the hands of people likely to commit such atrocities.

After a mass shooting, we’ve become too familiar with how this debate over guns unfolds, and many of us are frustrated that very little ever changes.

However, I believe we will have sensible gun legislation so those with mental illnesses don’t have access to a gun, and red flag laws will help law enforcement identify those who are more likely to go on a shooting spree and secure weapons before a tragedy occurs.

I think it is inevitable because attitudes are going to change as more and more of us have these direct and indirect connections to mass shootings.

And a connection to a tragedy changes attitudes.

When drug overdose deaths were a thing that appeared to mostly happen in far-away cities, there wasn’t that much support in rural Wisconsin for attacking the problem. But when overdose deaths began to occur in the suburbs and rural communities, the reality of the drug epidemic hit home, and widespread support for addressing it grew. 

We are slowly, incrementally, each finding some point of connection to a mass shooting just because there have been so many of them: 503 mass shootings in 2024 alone.

The question in my mind is not if the legislation will happen, but how many people will have to die before enough of us, regardless of political affiliation, demand  sensible gun legislation.