It’s hard for me to think coherently about much today, let alone health insurance, because what my mind really keeps returning to is that monumentally stupid shooting at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City and the Village Shalon Retirement Community.
I’m from Kansas City. One of my first memories is of being a 3-year-old in the Roadrunners summer camp group at the Kansas City JCC. The following year, I recall winning a ribbon for being “an enthusiastic dancer.”
My uncle’s mom lives at Village Shalom. My grandmother used to go to events there.
Police say Frazier Glenn Cross — a man who wanted to kill Jews — went to the JCC and managed to kill Reat Griffin Underwood, age 14, and Underwood’s grandfather, Lewis Corporon, who were Methodists.
Police say Cross then went to Village Shalom and killed Terri LaManno, who was at the retirement community to visit his mother. LaManno was Roman Catholic.
Police say Cross could not qualify to get a gun himself but got the ones he used to kill the people he killed by going through someone who had a clean record.
Cross, apparently, is extremely well-known to people who track potentially murderous loons.
So, on the one hand, this is a story about keeping guns out of the hands of clearly violent loons.