The world seems just a little darker today.

Yesterday, the world learned of the senseless slaughter of 27 people, including 20 children by a very sick individual. Here in Memphis, we learned of the death of a police officer - a wife and mother - slain on duty while her partner is also shot, though he still survives.

Many are calling for increased gun control; and while I agree that we should be attempting to limit the exposure to these mediums of death, I also have one pivotal question for everyone:

Is ANY weapon less dangerous in the hands of those willing to use them for Hate?

Was the knife any less bloody in China? Did the fires not blaze just as brightly in Essex this past October?

Regardless of your personal beliefs, you have to realize that those willing to kill, those who desire to take another's life, will do it. Regardless. It's heartbreaking and terrible, most definitely; but at the same time, I have to wonder just what it is that brings people to become these Monsters that can commit these forms of crime.

How do you become someone who can needlessly cut short the lives of innocents? How much pain do you have to suffer or inflict on yourself - I'm under no false pretenses here - to turn yourself into that sort of beast? How do you even begin to formulate that much hatred for anyone?

I think of all these parents who have lost their children, the babies who have lost their mother, the husbands without their wives ... and I just want to hold my son that much more closely today. I've gone through the loss of a very dear friend who departed this life only two weeks after we graduated high school; and I will never forget the look of complete and utter heartbreak on his family's faces. ... And that was an accident. I can't even attempt - nor do I want to - empathize with these families.

I suppose, in all my rambling, what I'm really trying to say is that... at the end of the day, perhaps we should all learn to appreciate what we have a little more. We are all blessed - by whichever gods/goddesses/sciences we choose to believe in - every day to even HAVE that day and we should never forget that. Maybe... if we learned to value life more, things like this wouldn't happen.

Then again, maybe I'm just hoping for a naive pipe dream.

Today, kids, I just ask that you hold those you care about just a second longer. Just a little tighter. With just that little bit more of appreciation for the love they CHOOSE to give you.