Refinery29
In America, Getting Back To “Normal” Brings Fears Of More Mass Shootings
It should not be normal to know that every time you go to the grocery store or your local coffee shop, somebody could gun you down and kill you, or that you could find yourself running and hiding from a mass shooting attack. It is not something that people in most countries in the world experience, or that anybody should experience. Yet when you hear from Americans who have survived mass shootings, there are a lot of reflections like, “I always knew in the back of my mind that something like this would happen to me one day.” “It’s been in my head that something like this could happen,” Logan Smith, who was working in the Starbucks kiosk at King Soopers grocery store in Boulder, CO, when a man murdered 10 people on Monday, told the TODAY show on Tuesday morning. He explained that there had been other times his and his coworkers’ lives had been threatened, though they were “not as severe.” During the shooting, Smith helped a coworker hide behind some trash cans, and tried to find cover himself. He said two of his coworkers were killed in the shooting, and that he still hasn’t heard back from a third. “It’s harder even than it was yesterday, just thinking about the friends that I’ve lost.” The U.S. is the only country in the world where mass shootings like the ones in Boulder and Atlanta, where a young white man killed eight people across three Asian-owned spas…
