LOS ANGELES TIMES, Sunday, November 11, 2018: “BARBARA MARCUS of Sherman Oaks puts a twist on ‘thoughts and prayers‘”
“Play the tape again.
Eleven people who were going about their lives at a bar in Thousand Oaks Wednesday night are not alive today; neither is an officer who rushed to help them. The man suspected of being responsible for those deaths — a young military veteran believed to have suffered mental trauma — is also dead. Police say he used a gun with an extended magazine to fire on the unsuspecting crowd before killing himself.
These details alone are enough to prompt sadness and anger from our letter writers. But the real outrage — expressed mostly in forceful, polished, complex sentences, as anger rarely is, because our readers have had plenty of practice writing about gun violence — is stirred by the knowledge that mass shootings in public places have become routine.
I wish to be the absolute first to offer my thoughts and prayers to the victims of the next mass shooting. My thought and prayer at the moment is that I will not be among the next group of victims.
Oh, and my thoughts and prayers extend to all those who believe that their thoughts and prayers absolve them from the duty to demand real and workable gun control laws.”
BARBARA MARCUS
As published in the Los Angeles Times, Sunday, November 11, 2018
BEST, JAY
JAYSPEAK 