Last month I heard three words spoken in the span of a few hours, but in two very different context. These words were “animal” and “words matter.” Six weeks later, I still hear them. The word animal, used during a press conference out of Odessa, Texas, following the latest mass shooting tragedy in our country’s gun violence epidemic, felt so out of place. I sat perplexed as I listened to the chief of police explain the event of the previous day. He said that his people had “caught the animal” that committed this crime. Had I heard correctly? Did the chief of police just say that the man that had driven around with an AR-15 randomly shooting humans was an “animal?” I wondered what type of animal the police chief was thinking of when he called him this.