Your Thursday Oklahoma

A day unlike any other. But like all the others

231 Mass Shootings in 2022

We’ll be back next week with the usual silliness and disbelief.

Thanks, Charlie, for asking.

And we conclude, as is our custom, in the great state of Oklahoma, whence Blog Official Red River charge d’affaires Friedman of the Plains takes a break from his usual contributions herein to deliver a report from across town, in Tulsa, our latest nationally famous killing ground, where he lives.

I was making a pizza when Melissa, my wife of seven weeks, came in from the front porch. “We’re moving now!” She was talking about Iceland. It’s an inside joke between us.

I could tell she wasn’t joking. “What happened?”

There was a shooting in South Tulsa, at the Natalie Medical Building, across the street from Saint Francis Medical Center, a large pink and glass hospital. “There are five dead,” she read off her cell. It was early. Local television news was reporting just one.

Maybe there weren’t five.

One killing could be an angry spouse, a disgruntled employee. One doesn’t make you think of renting an apartment in Reykjavik.

Maybe she was wrong. She wasn’t wrong.

Some reporters said, “Five people were killed, including the killer,” some said, “Four people were killed, plus the shooter.” Humanity is in the details.

First time I was in that building, decades ago, I was having my prostate checked.

Strange what you remember.

We live crosstown, near the University of Tulsa, about seven miles north. But it doesn’t matter that it was crosstown. The Tops Friendly Supermarket in Buffalo is crosstown; Robb Elementary in Uvalde is crosstown; Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg is crosstown, Pulse Night Club in Orlando is crosstown, Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown is crosstown. America is crosstown.

I took a walk. What would you do?

On my walk around the campus, a man came up behind me. I felt his shadow; I passed a man at a bus stop who was dancing, half on the curb, half on the street, punching his arms and kicking out his feet in all directions; I saw a shadow of a man sitting by a tree who appeared to be talking to a dog who was between his legs. I’m alive because they didn’t want me dead.

Such is paranoia.

Before I left for the walk, a reporter advised viewers to prepare for such events and practice active shooter drills. It’s what surrender sounds like.

No official, no reporter mentioned Uvalde, but in every piece about the response of local, state, and federal law enforcement officials — pegged at three minutes from the first 911 call — the implicit criticism of the Uvalde Police Department’s response was clear.

“It’s the way they were trained,” said one news anchor, proudly, of how officials here answered the call. You can’t get from the parking lot to a doctor’s office in that building in three minutes. Does the embellishment matter? For the record, when the first law enforcement officials arrived, the shooter had or was in the process of shooting himself. Maybe that doesn’t matter either. A dear friend had her hip replaced recently and was scheduled to be on the 2nd floor of the Natalie Medical Building on Wednesday afternoon for her follow-up. She cancelled.

She’d be dead.

When I returned from walking, Melissa had already gone to bed. I turned the TV back on. There was now a report of some connection between a possible bomb in a Muskogee home, the killer, and what happened in Tulsa. Someone emailed me with a rumor the killer wanted pain meds and was refused. But there was also the weather report about grain problems in Southwest Oklahoma due to the rain. There were car commercials. There were campaign ads. One of the anchors said the station would keep a close eye on the tragedy throughout the evening.

He then wished us goodnight.

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert opened with a skit about Elon Musk and horse sex. America was moving on, headed crosstown.