Our daughter was on the bus coming home from a meeting in Boston. I was putting on my coat to go pick her up at the bus station. She texted that she’d received a message from our nephew, who works in law enforcement.
“Are you home?” he asked her.
She said not yet.
He told her he had been called to an incident at a gym located close to us in Londonderry and was on his way there. Our daughter began texting my wife to let her know, when we saw a breaking news alert on television with a background of flashing lights at the end of our street. A helicopter, or several, were flying overhead.
We’re used to planes flying into Manchester given our proximity to the airport, but this was different. Loud and penetrating.
This can’t be good, I thought.
There had been a shooting. The reporter said cars were lined up and wouldn’t be able to get in or out of the road for quite some time. Then we got a phone alert, caller ID “State of New Hampshire,” with the State Police Department advising Winding Pond Road was closed until further notice.
I locked all the doors, even closed the curtains overlooking our deck. I’d never been this close to something like this and began to feel a driving fear amid the unknown as gun violence found its way to our neighborhood.
My mind raced. Were there multiple shooters? Were they hiding in the apple orchards that surround our home – our safe place?
Our eyes remained fixed on the television amid a growing sense of panic. We contacted our in-laws, who picked up our daughter at the bus station and took her home to the next town.
What we learned was that a man had fired his gun at the nearby Planet Fitness. Thankfully nobody was hurt. The shooter fled but was apprehended about a half mile away on Winding Pond Road, the entrance to a group of condominium complexes.
That close; that close.
Our daughter has a membership at Planet Fitness, along with the yoga studio next door. We shop at the supermarket in that plaza. I’m friendly with the owner of the coffee shop there, and we regularly get lunch from the sub shop just around the corner.
It’s all so deeply personal.
Shootings don’t happen here. They happen at high schools and elementary schools in Texas, or Florida and Colorado, or a small private school in Wisconsin. They happen at a targeted supermarket in Buffalo, a temple in Pittsburg. A bowling alley in Lewiston, Maine, was too close. But my neighborhood? Unfathomable.
By now, we know the shooter was 23-year-old Calvin M. Ly-Bishop of Bedford, who was shot to death by police when he jumped from his car and fired his gun while being apprehended about a half mile away.
I know nothing more than this about Ly-Bishop – not his motivations, his intentions, his state of mind. I just know the incident left me shaken, and once again reflecting on gun violence in America
Is this a mental health issue, as many gun advocates suggest, or is it a prevalence of guns issue, as gun restriction proponents argue? Of course it’s both. Events and investigations after the fact, particularly in school shootings, suggest that the two are intertwined. A majority of shooters have been marginalized – loners with not many friends who want to make a statement with the help of firearms.
Gun advocates talk about protection. But the CDC tracked a 35% increase in gun violence from 2019 to 2020. States with stricter gun laws like Massachusetts, California, Hawaii, New York and New Jersey, had far fewer incidents. States with the most guns per capita (and in counties with higher poverty), like Mississippi, Louisiana, Wyoming, Missouri, and Alabama, had the highest.
We regulate car ownership and the right to drive. We regulate buying and using tobacco products. We regulate alcohol. But when it comes to guns, we remain persistently reluctant to support regulation of weapons that have the ability to kill.
We – even the U.S. Supreme Court – refuse to accept that the Colonial-era “guarantee” was a product of a different time, with a different set of circumstances and in a totally different context. So on we go, despite the frightening reality.
We won’t ever eliminate gun violence. Guns will always fall into the wrong hands. No amount of restrictions or red-flag laws will allow us to totally remove this threat. But we can, with well-thought-out actions, reduce it.
I may not personally remember scenes of violence at a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, Illinois, or at an outdoor music event in Las Vegas. I wasn’t there.
But I will always feel a tug if my daughter goes back to the local Planet Fitness. I will always remember the flashing blue lights at the end of my street.
Like a victim returning to a crime scene, I will always associate my neighborhood plaza with so many frightening personal connections to the night that everything changed.
Tom Walters is a retired music teacher, school arts administrator, and a past president of the Massachusetts Music Educators Association. He lives in Londonderry, blogs at imthinkingno.com, and can be reached at tomwalters729@gmail.com.