“Too Close to Home”

August 9, 2019

By Jim Culp

Yesterday was another scene on the news that warranted two or three views to get your head around it. A lone shooter was arrested for killing and wounding innocent shoppers as they went about their daily lives. This shooting hit home for me. I was raised to age eleven in El Paso, and my brother Dave and our neighborhood cronies would walk two and a half miles to the Cielo Vista Mall about every other Saturday. We didn’t shop for anything (we rarely had any money) but we walked around in the air conditioning and went into stores to salivate over the stuff they were selling.

The shooting that occurred yesterday is at a Walmart that (nowadays) is just about two football field’s distance west of the mall. It’s one of the large ones (a Super-Center) that has everything under one roof.

But just like many places where these shootings occur, there was no armed security, and the gutless piece of garbage wielding a semi-automatic rifle did some incredible damage before the police grabbed him. He was a 21-year old kid… and must have had a fair amount of ammunition.

El Paso is a crowded city, it has grown to immense proportions since I was a kid on Candlewood street playing with my Johnny West and Geronimo figures. When I was a little kid, there wasn’t much on the East side of except one shopping center and a lot of desert. The turn to where our cousins, aunts, and uncles lived was out in the middle of nowhere. Nowadays, you’re not out of the city much until you reach Horizon City.

As a former soldier, I always look at these shootings for signs of things that could have gone worse, and things that could have been prevented. In the military, we called these After-Action Reviews (AARs), and you learn a great deal from them…good or bad.

The shooter yesterday was in a Target Rich Environment, an area that (in the military) a shooter (or gunner) is looking for his most dangerous targets and prioritizing them for his next shot. If there were systems in place to hinder or detour him, there would not have been so many dead or wounded. This guy, like many others before him, freely moved about and shot at least thirty people with a 7.62 X39 rifle. Businesses in our country need to start taking precautions and hiring armed security. If this guy would have been worried about opponents instead of victims, he wouldn’t have been so free to indiscriminately slaughter people.

Do you think these shootings will stop? Think again. This country is quickly descending into anarchy, and these kids that are doing these shootings are being groomed to do them by someone, some organization, or some government entity. If companies don’t take precautions to defend themselves from random shooters, citizens are going to pay the price.

One last thing. Another shooting has happened since I have started writing this page. Tomorrow, ignorant people will start asking for more gun laws. They’ll rant and rave about “children with machine guns,” and “no one needs an AR-15.” Please don’t go down that path. We don’t stop selling cars when people get ran over by them, and we don’t ban cutlery when butchers work too fast and cut a finger off. We need to get to the root of a problem, and get it fixed. Congress won’t do it…they are too busy taking 30-day vacations.

Meanwhile, arm yourself. Protect yourselves. Be aware. This isn’t going to over for a while…

-Jim