If someone had given me a crystal ball 30 years ago and showed me the types of barbaric atrocities occurring within the borders of the United States, I would have shook my head in disbelief.

It seems like a mass killing or horrific murder is being reported every month — if not every week. On the national scene, the mass killings of innocent people on 9 / 11 have been followed by an endless number of mass killings of innocent adults and children in schools, movie theaters and the Boston Marathon.

In Minnesota, there were three searches going on simultaneously for young women police believe were killed by men in their lives. In Pennsylvania, an abortion doctor was convicted of several murders of babies that were born alive, then killed. The good doctor kept baby body parts in jars around his office, like grisly trophies.

I try to teach my four children that this is not normal, that this is not the type of society that I lived in when I was their age. I hope that we adults do not allow our children to become desensitized to these horrors. We should all be screaming at the top of our lungs in outrage.

I would have more respect for our society if we were storming the courthouses rather than sitting in collective and apathetic silence as these tragedies unfold around us.

Corby Pelto, Plymouth