In the United States, we choose guns over people, every time | Helen Ubiñas

When do you think you’ll hear pop-pop-pop and wonder what the sound is, and where it’s coming from?

Will you know before it’s too late?

Where do you think you’ll be — school, church, a movie theater, a grocery store like those trapped in a Colorado King Soopers on Monday — when you realize it’s gunfire?

Do you think you’ll have time to run or “Spider-Man crawl” to safety the way a survivor described fleeing the store before 10 people, including a police officer, were shot and killed?

Even after Tuesday’s news conference nearly 24 hours after the grocery store attack, there is a lot we still don’t know. But one survivor summed up something we Americans should know for sure.

“It seemed like all of us had imagined we’d be in a situation like this at some point in our lives,” said James Bentz, 57, who described being inside the store when the shooting happened.

What a haunting and damning indictment of how our country chooses guns over people, every time.

After Columbine High School.

After Sandy Hook Elementary School.

After the Pulse nightclub.

After Parkland.

After the spa shootings in Georgia, just one week ago.

After hundreds of daily shootings in Philadelphia, where residents don’t have to imagine if, but when.

It’s been nearly three years to the day that I walked into Philadelphia’s Parkway Center City Middle College to meet students who stood in solidarity with Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School after a shooter walked into that Florida school on Valentine’s Day and killed 17 of their classmates and teachers.

But, they also wondered when some of the fleeting national focus might turn to them and the violence that affects them every day.

And here we are again, pundits and politicians with the gall to proclaim that enough is enough in the wake of another mass shooting that only puts into sharper focus how enough is never enough in this country.

Boulder’s assault-weapons ban was blocked by a judge 10 days before the grocery store attack.

Flags had barely been raised back to full staff after the shootings in Georgia that claimed the lives of mostly women of Asian decent before they were lowered again for those killed in Boulder.

And yet just hours after the Colorado shootings, the National Rifle Association tweeted out part of the article in the U.S. Constitution that states:

“A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

That kind of shameless blood gurgling is kind of their thing.

On the 2018 morning that students across the country walked out of their schools in honor of those killed in Florida by a gunman wielding an AR-15-style rifle, the NRA tweeted out a picture with this disgusting caption:

“I’ll control my own guns, thank you.”

Always too soon for their ilk to talk about gun control. Never too soon to step over the bodies of those killed by guns.

We hear enough is enough in Philly, too. Usually after another child is shot or killed, and politicians scramble to hide their complicity, and residents try to come up with all kinds of ways to get those in power to do what needs to be done.

A hunger strike — or two — to push the mayor to approach gun violence with the kind of urgency shown other crises in the city.

A plan to run 499 miles in honor of the same number of people killed in the city in 2020, most by guns.

Oh, you read that right. I’ll tell you more about it in another column, but as I was talking to the man planning this run between April and the end of the year, I couldn’t help but think what his extreme effort said about us.

No one should have to starve themselves outside City Hall, or run hundreds of miles, or do any number of things to hope that enough will one day truly be enough in this country and in this city.

But here we are. Again.

At best hoping that when it’s our time, in a bar or at temple or anywhere U.S.A., we make it out alive.