Passage 4

Life moves on—even in Tucson. The flowers and candles are being dismantled. The fresh golf courses are filled with winter visitors. The funerals that marked life here for two weeks are over.

But it will be a long time before this desert community puts behind it, if it ever does, what happened in an instant on a sunny Saturday morning in front of a supermarket.

On that day, at La Toscana Village strip mall, I peered past the police tape at the blooded-smeared sidewalk and the covered bodies of the victims. I knew I had to focus and ask questions. I had to file a story. But I also had to stop for a minute to process my breaking heart.

Nineteen people, including a 9-year-old girl, a federal judge and a member of Congress, had just been gunned down in my home town.

In the past more than 25 years, I have seen the unspeakable many times. I wrote about the slaughter of 32 students inside their Virginia Tech classrooms. I reported on the random shootings of 13 people in the Washington area by two snipers. I have covered countless murders of youths on the streets of the District.

But I never expected to see this kind of tragedy here in my safe heaven. Here I breathed the clean desert air, especially intoxicating after a rain, filled with the fragrance of creosote and sage. Here I drove 15 minutes out of town to Gates Pass to watch the spectacular sunsets and then marvel at the big, starry Arizona sky. This was my city, a blend of Native American and Mexican culture, where the sun shines more days a year than anywhere else in the country.

The world is filled with cities that are touched with senseless violence. And after the streets are swept clean, life goes on. People go back to work and to play. On the surface, it appears as if nothing really changed.

But something has. Extreme acts of violence affect the psychological and social fabric of a community in subtle but important ways. The place where residents have felt safe doesn't feel quite so safe anymore. Insecurity creeps in. Anxieties rise.

In the days that followed, my home town was transformed into a national media spectacle, complete with a camera ready headline: “Tragedy in Tucson.” Famous television anchors flew in and set up with my beloved Santa Catalina Mountains as their backdrop.

Growth and development had long ago changed Tucson. At the end of roads where there was once only desert, there are expensive sprawling homes, luxury resorts and strip malls, like the one where Jared Loughner pulled out his Glock 19. Making my way around Tucson, a flood of childhood memories came back, but now superimposed on them were images from the bloodbath.

So, too, it is with those who live here. Their lives go on, but in ways big and small the city they call home is not quite the same as it was before.

“The flowers and candles are being dismantled” ________.

What did the author least expect?

By saying that “something has” (Para. 8), the author means that ________.

What do we know about the Glock 19?

What is most probably the author's career?