I heard the news that there had been a shooting Thursday in the International District (a place some people still call Chinatown), but I didn’t know that it was Donnie Chin until Friday: Donnie Chin, Chinatown ID’s ‘frontline hero,’ killed in early morning shooting. He’d been the director of the International District Emergency Center for some years. The IDEC is hard to describe. A “volunteer-based emergency services organization” Yes, they provided emergency medical services, but Donnie did so much more. He got homeless people to shelters, he helped find lost children. He checked regularly on elderly and disabled residents. He provided translation services for people whose English was not good, helping them navigate the medicare system and so forth. They say a lot of elderly people who realized their memory was getting bad, actually left their prescriptions with him, and he came to their homes and gave them their pills for the day, so they wouldn’t accidentally overdose themselves. On top of all that, he simply patrolled the neighborhood, keeping an eye out for trouble.

I didn’t know Donnie personally. I first heard of Donnie back in the 90s, when I was briefly dating a guy who was active in the Q-Patrol (Donnie wasn’t involved in Q-Patrol, it’s that some of the people in Q-Patrol were trying to model what they did on the things that Donnie and his organization did in the International District). And I remember when one of the local papers ran a nice story on him a few years later.

What can I say, except that we’ve lost a hero?

In other regional news, there was some good news yesterday: Court sides with state on Plan B sales. When you’re a pharmacist, your job is to provide medication, not impose your religious beliefs on others. And the court agrees. I go further: I think that refusing to provide Plan B because they think it is an abortion drug is proof that the pharmacist is incompetent at the science side (it isn’t abortion, the biochemical process prevents implantation, just like birth control methods taken before the act), and should have their license revoked. But I’m a hard ass.

And of course, Lafayette Shooter Was A White Supremacist Tea Party Type. Yes. And in case there is any doubt, La. gunman was a Tea Partier who hated Obama, admired Hitler and wanted women to shut up in church where we also learn, “Houser was turned down for a concealed carry permit in 2006 because of apparent mental health issues and a previous arrest in Columbus, Georgia, for arson.” And I already know that since the mass shooting of 20 grade school children a few years ago couldn’t get America off its collective butt and pull its head out of its arse and admit that there is something seriously wrong with the gun laws in this country, I know an angry man killing two women and injuring nine others in a movie theatre isn’t going to do anything, either. One thing I want to observe: some of the headlines and summaries describe it as if it was blindly shooting into the crowd, but that isn’t what witnesses described. He slowly, silently, and methodically shot at individuals. I suspect it is no coincidence at all that the two fatalities were young women. Angry misogynist murders women at showing of film by feminist comedian; police worry “we may not find a motive.”

Meanwhile, yet another church in Charleston has been shot at: Bullet holes found in third Charleston Co. church. *sigh*