Today’s front page headlines in The Greenville News, “2 Dead in Highway Shootout,” “Police work to understand incident that left 4 dead.” Inside the first section is a school picture of one of the victims, 9-year old Hayden King. I keep thinking about the police officers who had to look inside the car and see the bodies of Hayden and his little sister 5 year old Harper and their mother Jessica Edens. That’s a picture you won’t be able to easily forget.

This is what happens when desperate, angry people use guns to solve their problems.

I have been through two contentious divorces and a custody hearing so I can sympathize but it’s so hard to wrap your mind around reaching the point where you tip over the edge of sanity and are so blinded by rage that you kill your own children and yourself.

Everywhere I went today I saw kids and I kept thinking about that smiling picture of little Hayden King. Did they watch their mother shoot Meredith Rahme? Did Hayden watch his mother shoot his sister? It’s all too much to comprehend without going off the edge yourself.

I also have been thinking about the young woman gunned down in a parking garage that’s two blocks from my house. What if others had been in the garage at that moment, would they have been shot too? Any rational person will conclude after the latest series of senseless killings that there are too many guns. A loaded gun is an invitation to impulsively ruin your life or the lives of others.

I’m also thinking of the young mentally ill man in Pennsylvania, who shot and killed 4 young men and buried them on his family’s farm. He wasn’t supposed to have a gun because he had been involuntarily committed to a mental hospital last year. He used his own gun and borrowed a gun from his parents to commit the murders.

Can we please have a fact filled, sensible discussion about guns? Last time I looked a clear majority of the public supported universal background checks, reasonable waiting periods before a gun purchase and gun restrictions on the mentally ill. There are so many ifs at play here. If the background check on Dylan Roof had been extended another couple of days, he would have been denied the weapon that killed 9 people and himself. If Jessica Edens didn’t have a gun at her disposal, would she have tried to solve her problems in a non-violent way?

When can we stop perpetuating the myth that guns make us safer? I don’t feel safer knowing that someone was murdered in a public parking structure in the middle of the day.

I just can’t stop thinking about Hunter and Hayden and all the innocent kids caught up in gun violence, this insanity must stop.