Multiple journalists are dead in Annapolis. What could I say, really? When I saw the news, I froze for a moment. My heart, like every other time these kinds of tragedies strike, grew so heavy. But only for a moment. Only for a moment, because I remembered that we now have four more legacies to live up to.

Journalists are not the enemy of the people. We want to write. We want to give you what stories, what joy, what information we can. We want to record things as they happen, to give a voice to the voiceless. We want to shed light on things, to uncover meaning. And so, I suppose, this hurts so badly because it hits home. It would be easy to sit down and grieve.

Journalists don’t run away, though. We don’t turn away from the fire or the sirens or the natural disasters. We go toward them, we take our recorders out, we put our pens to paper. Already, the media has covered this tragedy, has kept breaking the news. No, we don’t stop, not even for ourselves.

This is our strength. We will not stop, not even now. People often think that killing journalists who report the facts will stop them from coming out, that erasing someone’s life can stop their legacy. Nothing could be further from the truth.

And so I would say, to the man who has done this, what did you think would change? What do you think you would accomplish? That you would quell the truth, that you would stop the flow of information? Quite the opposite, indeed.

We are already writing, already channeling our pain into words. You cannot stop the story by murdering the journalist. You cannot hide the message by shooting the messenger. You were wrong, gravely wrong, and so I will let you in on something you must not have realized: Not now, not then, not ever. It does not work. You cannot kill our words by killing us.

Cameron Gorman is a columnist. Contact her at [email protected].