Hundreds Of People Waited All Night For Blood Centers To Open To Donate Blood
People showed up to donate within hours of shooting
Within hours of the mass shooting that has killed 58 people and injured over 500 so far, people started showing up at hospitals and medical clinics to donate blood. It’s heart-warming to see how quickly we’ve responded to this act of evil, but it’s also devastating that we’ve gotten so good at it.
Just after 10 P.M., Stephen Paddock, from his room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel in Las Vegas, started shooting at a crowd of 22,000 concert-goers on the street below. 58 people are now dead, and over 515 have been reported injured. At 3:48 A.M., a local reporter tweeted out a video from a Las Vegas blood bank, where the parking lot was already full.
He then posted these images from inside the building:
Another TV anchor shared an image of people waiting all night outside a blood bank so that they could be there to donate when it opened in the morning:
Between 7 and 8 A.M., other Twitter users posted pictures of lines of people waiting to donate blood:
On Facebook, a woman posted another early-morning image from a blood bank, writing that “a native from the area picked us up and drove us here, no questions asked, strangers gave us breakfast so we can donate blood and the people here are doing an amazing job of organizing to get these people in. These people are amazing! #vivalasvegas”
These people are amazing, and responses like these are what continue to give us hope for our country. The knowledge that amid growing hatred, bigger guns with larger magazine sizes, and the corresponding higher body counts, there are still a lot of people out there who will get up in the middle of the night to stand in line and show that we’re better than this is what gets us through our all-too-common massacres.
But what we wish is that all these people were still in bed, asleep. We wish that they didn’t have to leave their homes at 3:00 in the morning to give their blood so that strangers might live. We don’t want to be warmed by images of hundreds of people in line to help the hundreds of other people who’ve been shot anymore. We don’t want to see all the good people have to do because one man with a cache of weapons decided to destroy others’ lives. We want everyone to be able to go home at night and sleep till morning. Why is that too much to ask?
