They don't want you to remember that Rachel Scott, the first victim of the Columbine High School killers, was eating lunch on the grass on a beautiful Colorado day when her life ended at age 17, shot four times by Eric David Harris in 1999.
They're glad that you forgot Jessica Ghawi, who barely escaped a mass shooting in a Toronto mall -- "I learned how fragile life is Saturday," she wrote afterward -- only to die a month later in an Aurora, Colo., movie theater when James Holmes began blasting away last July with his AR15 assault rifle, a 12-gauge pump shotgun and at least one of his two .40-caliber Glock handguns.
They don't want you dwelling on John Roll, who stopped by a shopping center in Casas Adobes, Ariz., on Jan. 8, 2011, to chat with his congresswoman, Gabrielle Giffords, about the backlog of cases on the federal bench, and was there shot dead by Jared Lee Loughner, the deranged gunman who shot Giffords through the head.
And they certainly don't think you need to bother yourself understanding the story of Lt. Murphy of the Oak Creek, Wis., Police Department, who survived being shot 15 times at point-blank range by white supremacist Wayne Michael Page at a Sikh temple last August.
Grievously injured, Murphy waved rescuers past him to help other victims.
What they're counting on, you see, is that America, numbed by the repetition of senseless gun violence, will continue to have a short memory for such atrocities.
