Frightening reality

There was a shooting at a northern Minnesota courthouse yesterday afternoon.  The alleged gunman is a defendant who had just been convicted at trial and shot the county attorney three times, as well as shooting three other people.  The defendant's attorney ran to help the county attorney, who had been shot in the leg and in the stomach and was bleeding heavily.

This saddens me. I am in a courthouse nearly every day of the work week. My courthouse has bailiffs and technically has a moveable metal detector that occasionally will be plugged in and pushed into place so people (myself included) have to actually go through it, but 99.9% of the time, the detector is shoved aside, unplugged, and out of the way.  The reality is that something like this could happen easily in the courthouse I'm in almost every day, because people generally know each other, the court people know each other, it's just another day at work for most of us and we generally don't expect to be shot while at work.

I think about that defense attorney having to use a belt to cinch the county attorney's leg wound and the county attorney asking the defense attorney to make sure his wife knew he loved her and I get chills.  It's way, way, way too easy to imagine myself in a similar situation, tending to one of the prosecutors I work with all the time as they tell me to make sure their spouse knows they love them. It's really frightening and creepy.

Prayers go out to everyone impacted by this terrible event.