I am a victim of gun violence.

It hurts me to my soul that I have seen the violence that ensues with gun violence.

I was in Southcenter Mall, just south of Seattle Washington, when the shots rang out.

I was selling cosmetics at a kiosk during a brisk November day in 2008 just before our beloved Black Friday. I was showing a single mother and her older son some products when I started hearing shrieking of people and a mass of movement coming right at me. Then I heard the gun fire, bullets whizzing into dry wall, bones, flesh and lives.

As the wall of terrified shoppers came at me during that frightful day, still etched into my mind as if I was on a battlefield in Iraq or Afghanistan, I attempted to quell the mass from trampling people. I then walked quickly to another store and hid with my cell phone calling my parents and girlfriend to let them know that it may be my last time calling. I could hear the police coming in the distance.

Two bodies lay in the middle of the mall, a 16 year old boy dead and 15 year old boy wounded. I later found a woman who was trampled in front of my kiosk I was standing at mere minutes earlier during that peaceful day.

When those shots rang out, do you want to know what my first thoughts were?

I do not have a gun to protect myself with. I am unarmed, a sitting duck, praying for the police to show up quicker rather than later and that gun-free zones do not work.

I never wanted to feel like that again in my life.

 Since the age of 21, I have carried a pistol on my person. Period. How could this shooting happen in a gun-free zone?

I simply do not understand the way the governor thinks that creating “gun-free” zones in certain Virginia buildings will stop a single shooter, who is determined on killing, from spelling out his evil upon our great republic. Does the governor not read the intelligence reports from the FBI, CIA, DEA or his own state police?

I am a citizen of this great state and certainly understand the deadly game he is playing with these policies. After San Bernardino, Paris, Sandy Hook and multitude of other failed gun-free zones, are you willing, as Governor, to play with the lives of our great republic with ill-sighted policies?

Are you willing to stand up with pride and say after an attack where 14 people massacred, with IED’s and pipebombs built and ready to use, and the attackers having been terrorists, to say that “Yes, I am proud that INSERT BUILDING HERE was gun free and I will tell those families that I will make more buildings just as gun/bomb free as they were in San Bernardino”?

Or

Are you going to take the side of the Republic and the constitution and allow more citizens to carry a weapon where at least, they would have a fighting chance rather than cowering in a t-shirt store in the mall holding a cell phone telling my family that I love them and I may not see them again.

Your choice Governor.