Madness

 Last year the city of Stockton, California had fifty-four homicides. Currently the total for 2025 stands at thirty-four. Civically, this feels like a victory. 

This isn't your standard "superheroes save the day" kind of victory. This is a pyrrhic victory, named for King Pyrrhus of Epirus, who won a battle against the Romans, but the cost of that victory came at such a cost that it was tantamount to a defeat. 

In Stockton, the four people killed at a children's birthday party this past Saturday evening would be counted among that cost. Eleven more were wounded. The dead were aged eight, nine, fourteen and twenty-one. The celebration of young life turned into a gaping hole of mourning. 

As is my custom, I find myself wondering once again about guns. As of this writing, there is no suspect and there is no motive. Just four dead kids. And another city full of people wondering why. 

Why won't there be a ninth birthday party?

Why won't there be a tenth?

A fifteenth? 

The indiscriminate certainty of a bullet entering a tiny body is something we are forced, once again, to confront. How compressed and black a form of evil could pull the trigger on a room full of children? What sort of derangement would make it possible for such a tragedy? 

Every time I write one of these posts, I feel like I am leaving my mark at one of those little shrines left at the site of the latest murder. Here is my candle. Here are my thoughts. Here are my prayers. 

Then I go home and wait for the next one. 

I'm running out of candles.