Editor’s note: The author originally wrote this for another publication 12 years ago after a drive-by shooting. He has submitted it here as a commentary on gun violence.

I heard his mother on TV say, “He is really a good boy.” I believe his mother. She wouldn’t lie.

He has friends, he goes to school, he laughs and has fun and he comes from a good family. Before now he hasn’t killed anyone.

So what happened? What went wrong? At what point did he get the idea that it was OK to pull the trigger sending a deadly bullet on its tragic course?

Was it the violence on TV? Was it the violence in the movies? Was it the violence in boxing? Was it the violence on our highways? Was it the violence in the news? Was it the violence of war as seen so graphically on TV?

Is our society in chaos and decline because we permit our children to witness mayhem in cartoons on TV? These cartoons are incessantly telling our kids that violence is fun. And with all the other forms of violence that we permit and even encourage our kids to see, “Isn’t the TV a great babysitter?”

But we can’t blame it all on TV or the movies.

All of us in this increasingly violent society must share some of the blame for the senseless killing of Missy Fernandez.

We have for decades allowed many forms of violence to become so common that now, when we are experiencing what it has done to us we say, “How did it happen?”

We need to open our eyes, brothers and sisters. We need to say “no,” and we need to stop the violence.

How?

A journey of a thousand steps begins with the first step.

You, we, all of us, in this violent society need to understand that we are the answer.

If each one of us will be responsible for our own actions and stop the violence in our own lives and show that attitude to our friends and families and even go out of our way to be nice to someone, then the first step is taken.

Missy’s life was ended in an act of violence so senseless that it is nearly incomprehensible, so that we could begin the journey of understanding that the violence must stop now.

That journey has begun and to Melissa “Missy” Fernandez we must now say that we are sorry that you had to buy, with your precious young, life, the consciousness of our responsibility for the senseless act which took you from us.

We must also accept that it is we who allowed the events to unfold that led to the point at which a young man, no less precious to us than Missy, took a deadly weapon into his hands, and fired a bullet into Missy’s head, and also into the minds of a culpable society.

“He is really a good boy,” his mother said of him, and if he is, he is one who just didn’t know that it was not OK.

And we let it happen.

It has to stop. The time has come.

Fred Freeman

Elma