I was 14, a freshman in high school, when the Columbine shooting happened. Kids today will never understand how big that news was. Just like the rest of the country, I obsessed over the story. I knew the names of the shooters and many of the victims. I took in so many detailed accounts from all corners of the school, that I could see vivid pictures in my head as if I’d been there. The shooting became part of me. It shook me. I went about my days feeling deeply unsettled, as my world had turned upside down. The world wasn’t as safe as I once thought. Schools weren’t safe. I knew bad things happened in the world, but not at school. How could a building full of kids trying to learn, be a dangerous place? If schools weren’t safe, what was? Fear settled deeply into my bones. My entire world felt like it shifted, and I desperately wanted to return to the innocence and naivete I enjoyed as a child. The innocence and naivete that today’s kids don’t get to experience.
We promised we would never forget.
Instead, we did something much worse than forget Columbine.
We accepted it.
We could have done something about it. We chose not to. We chose to do nothing after Columbine, and nothing after the 209 school shootings that have happened since then. We chose to do nothing after the 70 mass shootings that have happened since Columbine. Fun fact: Did you know Columbine no longer even ranks in the top 10 deadliest shootings in modern US history? The situation has gotten so much worse than 14-year-old-me could have imagined, and not by accident. This was deliberately chosen. We decided–and keep on deciding–that we value guns more than we value human life.
How many lives? Since Columbine, 164 lives lost in school shootings. Since Columbine, 607 lives lost in mass shootings. I know because I went through the lists and counted them. I invite you to check my math and count them yourself. It’s quite the experience to scroll through all those lines, adding up the numbers. At first, you feel the weight of every individual–the family, friends, and everyone affected by each lost life. Then, as you keep adding 3, and 5, and 6, and another 3, something scary happens–you start becoming numb. They’re just numbers… Until you hit a large number, where a couple dozen lives are lost at once, or your grand total crosses yet another hundred mark, and reality gives you another jolt. The weight of all that loss, all that tragedy, all that pain, comes crashing down again. I cried as I calculated. It turns out math can be a form of mourning.
We chose to sacrifice those hundreds of lives. We chose to ruin thousands of lives of those left behind. And I feel confident that we’ll keep on choosing these tragedies. There’s no reason to think Parkland, Florida was the last straw that will finally convince us to reset our moral compass. We know how to greatly reduce the violence and death. Every other developed nation on earth has managed to avoid this kind of carnage; their laws and methods aren’t a secret. We don’t follow their example, because we don’t want to. Human life isn’t actually important to us in the United States. We didn’t forget Columbine, and we aren’t surprised when it happens again and again. We’ve just decided that we’re ok with it. That this is acceptable damage.
My kids won’t ever understand how big of a deal Columbine was, because to them, a school shooting is just another Wednesday. There were more deaths today than in the 1999 shooting, but I’m guessing half my students don’t even know about it. Or if they do, they’ll have forgotten in a couple days. The city of Parkland, Florida won’t be forever engraved in their brains like Littleton, Colorado is in mine. It’s barely a blip on the radar. As adults, we won’t remember today’s details for long either. It’ll blend into the blur of indistinguishable horror with all the rest. Just white noise.
The details of the day won’t be on my students’ minds. But it absolutely stains their psyche. The human need for safety and security is as primal as it gets, and our society doesn’t offer it to our kids. There’s no avoiding the negative impact on their development.
Tonight will be another one of those nights when I fall asleep with terrifying images in my head of “what if it happened here.” I’ll play out every possible scenario in my head. What if my kids are the victims? What if my kid is the shooter? Maybe it doesn’t do any good to obsess about these terrible thoughts… but what if it does? What if I actually have to act in the moment one day? This might come as a shock, but teachers aren’t trained to be first responders. We work with police officers to learn and practice our school’s procedures, but it doesn’t help me feel much safer. I’m sure the 209 schools that have had shootings in the last 19 years had procedures too, and hopefully those procedures minimized the death count. But 164 lives were still lost. The thought of any of my own kids being added to that total….. I can’t. I just can’t.
People say they’re sending thoughts and prayers after each of these tragedies… but a lot of those people are lying. Actual thought and prayer leads to action. Leads to compassion. Leads to solutions. Leads to peace. If people, especially our elected leaders, were actually thinking deeply and praying sincerely, our culture wouldn’t be in the mess that it is. This people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoureth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me. (Matthew 15:8)
We don’t have to live like this. The rest of the world doesn’t. This is a uniquely American problem of our own creation. We need to start by overhauling our gun control laws, because duh. Choose any other developed nation, and design laws like theirs. It doesn’t even matter which country we choose as our model at this point. Any of them will be an improvement.
Then, once we slow the hemorrhage of American blood, we need to start addressing all the underlying problems that fuel the violence. We need to deal with why people are hurting so badly, that they want to harm others and themselves. We need to deal with why people are living in such desperate despair. We need to treat the pain. We need to treat the solitude. We need to strengthen our communities and care for each other. We need to make the wellbeing of our children the country’s number one priority.
Anything less should be unacceptable. That’s my thought and my prayer.