This past Sunday, a few minutes before 8 a.m. our time, I was out in back of our house taking pictures of some big mushrooms I found out there. I heard some gunshots -- it is still hunting season and there are deer and game birds and even wild boar in the forests around here. I have seen four deer so far in our yard and Jonathan saw two pheasants one day. And we had some really delicious venison slow-roasted with chicory that Daniele cooked up down at the pub last week. People who eat meat cannot be squeamish about hunting. So I heard the gunshots and knew what they were. Hunters for deer or birds or boar.

At exactly that same moment, it was just before midnight in Colorado Springs and a gunman was opening fire in a crowded LGBTQ+ club -- Club Q -- in Colorado Springs. He killed five people -- Raymond Green Vance, Kelly Loving, Daniel Aston, Derrick Rump, Ashley Paugh -- before being subdued by Richard Fierro and other patrons. We heard about it Sunday afternoon here, first just garbled reports. We spent the rest of the day waiting for updates, refreshing our browsers, checking our social media. 

Each of these acts of gun terror -- and the United States has them constantly -- is horrific. And it shouldn't matter whether I know the victims personally or not. It shouldn't matter that this one happened in the place where I lived for 26 years. It shouldn't matter that every browser refresh comes with a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that one of the names on these nightmare lists will be someone I know. They are all -- every act of murder -- heinous. 

But dreading to see the name of someone you care about on one of those awful lists nevertheless just makes everything so much worse.

On Tuesday, Jonathan and I had our first meeting with the immigration lawyer who is helping me with the process of getting Italian citizenship. "Why did you leave the US?" she asked me. So I told her the story of Club Q. 

She almost couldn't believe it because such things are incomprehensible here. They should be incomprehensible everywhere. But sadly they are not.