Children Getting Gunned Down at School No Longer Horrifies Me
And That's Terrifying In And Of Itself
I’ll never forget Columbine. When the news came, I gasped for air, tasted the bile that was rushing up from my stomach, and reached out in anguish to other humans. Did you hear…? Can you believe…? It was 1999. I was seven months pregnant with my first child. I reeled from the news, cradled my belly, and wondered what kind of world I was birthing my son into.
I had the same kind of gut reaction when second graders were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in 2012. I felt it again for the kids at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida in 2018. And again just last year when Ross Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas was shot up.
But when children were shot dead at a school again last week (this time, Nashville Tennessee) I noticed about myself – in the way you watch something in slow motion – that my amygdala did not go into a fight/flight/freeze mode in response. It seems that my brain has finally learned that children can and will be murdered while they attend school, and so while my brain registers the information, it accepts it as something normal in the environment, and moves on. I’ve become inured to the horror of it.
I’m not saying that I’m proud to feel this way, or that we should feel this way. We should in fact not feel this way. We should feel devastated that we feel this way, even as the shootings themselves will over time cease to devastate us.
And then what will this mean? How are we going to summon the will to march, fight, and bleed for causes that horrify us if they’ve become so common that they no longer horrify us? Don’t we lose as a species, don’t we fail to be the humans we purport to be, when we are unmoved by the murder of our own children? Do you see how our in-built psychological protection mechanisms are preventing us from experiencing the very outrage that would make us rise up against the threat?
This is what terrifies me. And where are you? If I’m reaching out for you through this bleakness with my hands outstretched, are you reaching back?
(Be sure not to miss the final line in the graphic above. ⬆️)
Why are we Americans such outliers vis a vis other human communities? Probably a lot of reasons. For one, a 2nd Amendment being incorrectly interpreted (in my view) and a “gun lobby” to protect that right. (Other nations find it curious, if not odd, if not incomprehensible; Google the issue and find articles written by journalists in other countries. Look at the comments from other countries in a Facebook post about a mass shooting here. People from other nations look at us suffering repeatedly and ask Just… what is UP, America??)
The gun lobby, led by the National Rifle Association, is quaintly quiet when its assault weapons commit mass murders of children. (“Guns don’t kill people, people kill people” is their motto, so you see in the prior sentence that I’ve given guns that very agency.) The NRA has lain siege. They’ve bought the requisite number of politicians who will refuse to pass universal background checks and an assault weapons ban as long as the NRA keeps funding their re-election. The NRA appears to be winning.
And hear this: Gun violence recently overtook automobile accidents as the number one cause of death for children and teenagers in America (read here.)
This is our truth.
This is the America that has been created on our watch.
How do we fight it?
How do we win?
Let’s talk about God for a moment. When I hear the oft-repeated phrase “hopes and prayers” following school shootings, I find it tiresome. A copout. I shout within myself What kind of God would sit back and wait for the requisite number of humans to pray enough for a horrific problem to go away? We are the flesh and blood humans who must put an end to the practice of children taking cover in their schools as a predator wields a weapon of war against them. I want us to summon the Godliness in each of us and demand better of all of us.
Scotland did it. In 1996 they had a mass shooting of sixteen schoolchildren and one adult and did away with handguns and that was the end of it. A handful of other industrialized countries have taken a strong stand (read comparisons here.) But that will never happen in America where a good portion of the populace feel that it’s actually their God-given right to tote and use guns wherever and however they feel like it. To them, it is part of the very essence of being an American. Some of them choose to make photos of their entire family bearing arms, and turn this photo into a Christmas card or a social media post. And they will fight to the death with those very guns to ensure that this right remains forever theirs.
To be brutally honest with you and with myself, my main motivation for writing this for you is to try to do the work to bring the outrage back to me. If you’re in the same place I am on this, grab my outstretched hand, join me in trying to jostle ourselves out of the implicit acceptance that it is commonplace and even unremarkable for children to be gunned down while attending school in America.
I encourage you to donate to at least one of the following organizations that are pushing for an assault weapons ban and universal background checks, which the majority of Americans want even if our elected politicians ignore the will of the people because they’re in the pocketbook of the gun lobby:
We are broken. We are the ones who can fix it. Share your feelings in the comments. Put your money where your mouth is with a donation to one or more of these great groups if you are able. Share this message.
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How sad that our guns are more important to us than our children.
Susan
I totally understand how you feel. I work in public schools and my daughter is in a public high school. I have joined all the groups, written letters to local and federal officials and I don’t see significant change. The only way I can continue to send my own child into a public school and to work there on a daily basis is to numb myself to the facts, data, and reality. Dealing with the facts and feeling the feels might literally terrorize me and prevent me from facing the reality of my situation.