The fallout from the Las Vegas shooting is ongoing – and it’s intensely personal

| 12:31 pm EDT March 12, 2018
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While there is so much focus on whatever insanity Donald Trump is doing today and what he might do tomorrow, I am going to go elsewhere today. I will warn you in advance, it might be a good idea to get a box of Kleenex as there will be tears. It is about Rosemarie Melanson.

She was one of the victims of the shooting at the concert in Las Vegas. She survived being shot, but her world since that fateful night has been living in a hospital, vomiting virtually every day, crying, and in constant pain. She can’t keep food down; she’s got multiple infections and has had nine surgeries so far. From the single gunshot she’s had surgeries to fix damage to her stomach, her liver and spleen. She’s far from done, with more surgeries needed. They have to wait for infections to subside. She waits in constant and never ending pain.

As newer shootings have happened and we tend to forget the old ones, we need to remember there are still people in horrible pain and suffering from what happened on October 2 2017. Rosemarie’s husband spends every night with her, comforting her as she cries many times she doesn’t even know why. The vomiting never seems to end, sometimes there’s blood.

I’ll let you read the rest of Rosemarie’s story in a powerful article written by a much better writer than me, which you can find here.

I write politics, I love to write about politics, so I feel compelled to do so. Rosemarie Melanson is a victim of both the shooter AND the NRA. They support and tacitly endorse this pain and suffering every time Dana Loesch opens her mouth, with another video, with another hate-filled speech, another idiotic and ideological diatribe over all we need is a “good guy with a gun” to prevent this carnage. If EVERY person attending that concert had a gun, who would they have shot at? The shooter was hundreds of feet away, hiding in a building and a wall of glass. “Good guys with guns” is their answer to everything and it’s as asinine as it is wrong.

And still there are people like Rosemarie who are still living in agony 153 days later. She’ll still be in the hospital for months longer. This is not our America, it’s the NRA’s vision of America and we need to stop them. While I would never wish anyone suffer like this, if anyone in the management of the NRA were to suffer like this, maybe they’d comprehend it better. To them, it’s not an issue, because they are in a gilded cage and don’t feel the pain and wrath of a bullet entering your body with the crushing and terrible damage it does to a human body, all in less than a second.

Maybe Dana Loesch should go to Las Vegas and meet this lady. Maybe if she was at that concert and was shot along with the other 58 people and she was still in the hospital 150 days later, still in agony, just maybe, she’d understand. Maybe she’d change her vile support for this weapon?
Or would she simply consider herself an NRA “soldier” and it’s just part of the job?