The Cost of Gunloonery

I'd meant to post this earlier, but life intervened.

All too often, we tend to think of the cost of gunloonery in terms of lives lost.  Certainly, that's a very heavy cost.  And gunloons would like for us to forget about the lives that are shattered in terms of families and friends. But there are many more instances where a gunloon's victim doesn't die; at least, not right away.

Here's one such story:

Six weeks later, he was in a rage when he tracked down Ms. Keo, then 17, at a friend's house in Oakton. He broke through the door of a bedroom where she had taken refuge and flashed a handgun, yelling "You're gonna die, bitch!" before shooting her four times.



She bled for two hours before police found her, then spent seven weeks fighting to survive. Doctors saved her life, but not her spinal cord: Ms. Keo was paralyzed from the neck down.

Her case riveted Washington for months. But the headlines eventually faded, and Ms. Keo's efforts to fashion a life continued in private. She was 45 when she died Dec. 8 of a respiratory illness at her home in Alexandria.