Letter: Work together to resolve gun violence

A 15-year-old boy's life ended in my hometown because a 14-year-old boy took it. People are dying in small towns and big cities and all over the country. People's lives are being bought and sold on the black market by payment of bullets and receipts printed from the trigger. The world is a dark and long journey through the woods, the guns belong to the big bad wolves and we're all just riding in the basket, hoping to make it to grandma's house.

Is there a method to the madness, for why wolves have guns in paws that don't know how to use such dangerous weapons? Why children are dying by other children? Why lives are being ticked off like tally marks in an invisible hit list on the streets where we've built our homes?

Our homes are broken, split, drowning in grief because of reasons unknown. Children are ripped from their parents' arms and left for silent goodbyes as they're lowered 6 feet under or swinging gates of jail cells shut behind them. Violence is flooding the streets like water rushing from a dam that hasn't began to heal after the last fatality. Each death leaves families, communities in a hell that burns so badly, they don't know how it feels to heal. When a child kills anther child, who deserves a funeral and who deserves a cell? Why aren't we fixing the wound before it's too late to see that they both deserve to live?

Courtney Snodgrass

Marion