The Year's Best Horror Stories by Gerald W. Page

Or that they may not be safe at a night club or even a concert on the Las Vegas strip - the national equivalent of a carnival midway.Īs this is written, we don't know the motives of the 64-year-old Nevadan who got an arsenal of at least 10 guns into a hotel room overlooking the site of a country music festival. Or that their children may not be safer than the 20 killed at an elementary school in Connecticut in 2012 or the 33 killed on the campus of Virginia Tech in 2007. They think that when they go to a movie, they may not be any safer than the 12 killed at a Colorado theater. The death tolls are comparatively small in a nation of 323 million, but people don't think in terms of statistics. Ramos, 38, was charged with five counts of first-degree murder, according to online court records.īut only the United States seems to be caught in an escalating cycle of these dreadful events. Seventy-seven dead - 69 shot and eight killed by the detonation of a car bomb - at the hands of a lunatic right-wing extremist in Norway in 2011. Thirty-five killed at a tourist site in Australia, also in 1996. And other nations have had terrible mass slayings committed by psychopaths: Seventeen killed in a school in Scotland in 1996. Today every Western nation is the crosshairs of extremists who defame a great religion by claiming to be inspired by Islam. And as horrible as Sunday night's massacre in Las Vegas was, even worse is the suspicion that after another week, another month, another year, all of us will again find ourselves groping for ways to react to an even worse outrage. We still believe that but have to acknowledge that hope gets tougher to sustain with each new outbreak of irrational mass bloodshed. We must believe that we can find it if only we try a little harder.' We must believe there is a solution, a way to prevent another mass shooting. About 15 ½ months ago, after 49 were killed and 58 wounded at a nightclub in Orlando, Florida, we wrote in this space, 'Of all the words this week, hopelessness may be the most dangerous.

The Year's Best Horror Stories by Gerald W. Page