Mothers and Shooters. What choice do we have?

One thing we know about every 18 year-old young man who commits a mass shooting in America: he has a mother.

Or at least he had one. Maybe she got shot.

Maybe getting shot is better than living through the hell of knowing your child murdered your neighbors’ innocent children.

There is no need to list all the horrific shootings taking place all around us. It’s an epidemic screaming out for a lock-down but Congress can’t be relied upon to act because of a broken political system that rewards bad behavior and spends too much time on social media.

Rise up even earlier, mothers! Because you don’t have enough to do taking care of everybody all the time, the adults need to take over the gun problem. Forget football boosters and prom. Every mother of a 17 year-old needs to drag his sorry ass up to the top of a mountain literally or figuratively as the case may be, and then back down and repeat until he’s too tired to be enraged.

And we need to rescue and mother the ones who are trapped alone in the dark shadows. We can do it! Think about that mother in Uvalde who ran into a mass shooting to pick up her kids at school.

I bet she cries every night for the ones she could not rescue. That’s what I do.

Communities need to support mothers of teenagers on the ropes following years of online “learning.”

Short of imposing a mandatory 5-year prison sentence on every young man turning 18, we need to send struggling families a lifeline. Who can they call when their child frightens them? What can we do to reach those untethered to any dock? How do we ground young men to our roots as a nation of laws when they are unmoored and adrift a turbulent sea? When they are not in possession of what bonds humanity.

How can we support families broken by gun violence?

We have all this God-damn data and security apparatus, why aren’t we using it to protect us? How about an App that can track and warn of AR-15’s?

Start by making a list. Surely if evil people peddling conspiracy theories can reach these deranged young people in our midst a homemade lasagna can.

Organize. Never doubt a small group of committed individuals can change the world. Look at Eleanor Roosevelt.

It will fall to mothers to organize neighborhoods and identify who in the petri dish of teenagers is staging the next tragedy. And it will fall mostly to women to care for the victims of gun violence who live to have nightmares about it.

If we can list and profile every senior on a sandwich board come graduation we can identify and track every potential time bomb, right?

We have no choice, apparently, when it comes to life or death by gun violence.