My granddaughter came over to visit Sunday for a couple of hours. Arianna is the oldest. She’s 7 now and each day I see her, it amazes me how “old” she is and how much she’s grown in every way possible. She’s learning about the world around her, and yet, can still be that baby who I fell so very much in love with seven years ago.

We played around for awhile and then I went to make dinner while she sat and watched educational music videos (KidsTV123 on YouTube – great channel for kids). As happy as I was to spend time with her, my heart was heavy and I stopped chopping the garlic in front of me and stared at Ari for a few minutes. Her back was to me but she felt my gaze and turned her head and smiled at me and asked why I was looking at her.

I couldn’t tell her the truth. I couldn’t say, “I’m scared for your future. I’m terrified what this world will be like when you’re an adult and I or your parents can’t protect you. I want to live forever just so that I know you and your sisters and cousins are going to be OK.”

Before she arrived, I had read the news about the church shooting in Texas. I shook my head with my hand over my mouth. Another damn shooting. Another senseless act of violence. More deaths. More grounds for political arguments on social media by people who have not one ounce of sympathy but just want to be “right.”

No longer can we look at these events as a gun control issue. We’ve had attacks from people making homemade bombs or using cars to drive into people. I have my opinion on gun control and believe there must be some changes made, however, people who are hurting so badly and suffering so greatly from obvious mental illness will use whatever they can to carry out these acts of terror.

What needs to happen is mental health experts – those who specialize in various forms of psychiatry and sociology – come to the table together, review all of these recent horrific crimes and find answers as to what is going on in this country and why there is an increasing amount of people who feel their only answer is to bring harm and death to fellow human beings.

It’s not the time to take funds away from mental health facilities and organizations. We pump millions into our military to defend our country from outsiders and into space defense to defend our world from alien attacks and yet, we can’t find the dollars to try to learn what’s causing this growing war inside of our own borders.

I’ve always been a pretty positive, glass-half-full kind of person. I’m having a harder time remaining so lately. I don’t know the answers but I do believe we have the people who, if given the resources, can find those answers.

“I just like to look at you because it makes me happy,” I tell my granddaughter, who giggles and turns back around to finish watching the cheerful video.