Side Bar - This one was way too close to home

As of this past weekend, there have been 72 mass shootings so far this year in the United States. All of them have occurred in other cities, other states, putting distance and geography between us and grim reality.

But not this last one.

The shooting that took three young lives and seriously injured five others on the campus of Michigan State University the evening of Monday, Feb. 13 brought this terrible affliction that grips our society way too close to home for many residents of Antrim and Kalkaska Counties. We all know where East Lansing is and  lots of us have spent  many classroom hours in Berkey Hall and socialized over coffee and food in the Student Union. We’ve frequented  those  places in the good old days when sanity prevailed.

Even closer to home, and more importantly, hundreds of MSU students call this two-county region home and they all have parents, relatives, close friends and neighbors who saw them off to college this past fall, never expecting to have them call home months later to report that they are locked in their rooms, hiding out from an “active shooter,” a term, by the way, that we are hearing all too often these days.