Take a couple of minutes to digest the concept, unthinkable for baby boomers when we recall our respective childhoods, that we now routinely refer to schools and houses of worship, as “soft targets.” What is our civic responsibility in response to the now embedded process of active shooter drills, school lock-downs, screams of code-red, and the aftermath – memorials of candles, flowers, photos and prayers – at the endless crime scenes that have irrevocably changed the fabric of childhood in America. Please go to the polls and vote on November 6.

The New York Times – A ‘Mass Shooting Generation’ Cries Out for Change – “Delaney Tarr, a high school senior, cannot remember a time when she did not know about school shootings. So when a fire alarm went off inside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and teachers began screaming “Code red!” as confused students ran in and out of classrooms, Ms. Tarr, 17, knew what to do. Run to the safest place in the classroom — in this case, a closet packed with 19 students and their teacher.

I’ve been told these protocols for years,” she said. “My sister is in middle school — she’s 12 — and in elementary school, she had to do code red drills.” This is life for the children of the mass shooting generation. They were born into a world reshaped by the 1999 attack at Columbine High School in Colorado, and grew up practicing active shooter drills and huddling through lockdowns. They talked about threats and safety steps with their parents and teachers. With friends, they wondered darkly whether it could happen at their own school, and who might do it. Now, this generation is almost grown up. And when a gunman killed 17 people this week at Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland, Fla., the first response of many of their classmates was not to grieve in silence, but to speak out. Their urgent voices — in television interviews, on social media, even from inside a locked school office as they hid from the gunman — are now rising in the national debate over gun violence in the aftermath of yet another school shooting…”