Surreal in Silver Spring
The Discovery Channel building hostage news was surreal yesterday, if only because it’s a local event for me and a friend was “locked-down” in a neighboring building. I was a little shocked to find out that this (obviously disturbed) man was killed. What he did was unequivocally wrong, but it was a tragic end to the day nonetheless.
I was reading all of this online, so it wasn’t until this morning that the surreality hit home again. On the local news, they showed snipers prone, a SWAT truck, a robot sitting next to another ominous black vehicle, and a soldier running to the scene. All of this for a single man with a handgun and some homemade bombs.
It’s impossible to convincingly play the role of a Monday-morning quarterback, but one can not help wonder if this anti-gun state were instead a place where even 10% of the population open-carried? Maybe Lee was deranged enough to have gone on his mission anyway. But would it have taken 4 hours, what seems like the entire Montgomery County arsenal (why does my county have an arsenal?), helicopters into the night, and the lobby still shutdown this morning?
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