How Gun Violence Left Its Mark on My Childhood and Our Generation
It was December 14, 2012. I was in eight grade. I was sitting in Mr. Jurina’s computer lab. I was in eighth grade. When I opened up the Internet, I saw a news article with a picture of kids walking in a line. They were all holding onto each other. This is what I saw:
I didn’t bother to read the headline attached to it. I didn’t understand what it was about. Sadly, I even remember making a joke about the picture, not knowing its significance. Later that evening, my mom picked me up from basketball practice and told me what had happened. That picture was then put into context. There was a school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Twenty-year-old Adam Lanza killed 26 people and then himself.
Twenty first grade children—ages 6 and 7. Four teachers. One principal. One school psychologist. All killed. Murdered by gun violence, their futures were stolen. Their families were never the same.
Throughout high school, I’d frequently watch the news to stay updated on what was happening in the world. Looking back, the amount of times the top story on CNN was a mass shooting seemed like every other week. Sitting on our living room couch, I sat watching politicians, newscasters, and family members react to the biggest mass shootings that ever occurred:
- Aurora Theater Shooting (July 20, 2012) – A gunman interrupts a midnight screening of The Dark Night Rises in Aurora, Colorado. He kills 12 people and seriously injures 70.
- San Bernadino Shooting (December 2, 2015) – Two “homegrown violent extremists” carry out a terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California. They kill 14 people and wound 22 at a Christmas party for the county’s Department of Public Health.
- Pulse Nightclub Shooting (June 12, 2016) – A gunman kills 49 people and seriously wounds 53 others inside of a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida.
Over my four years in high school, sadly, mass shootings and school shootings started to feel normal. Collectively, we as a country began to feel numb when we heard “10 killed” or saw a headline that a teenager murdered his classmates.
It was the first semester of my freshman year at Penn State. On the morning of October 2, 2017, I woke up in my dorm room and pulled out my phone to see that 413 people had been shot while attending a music festival overnight in Las Vegas. Overall, 58 people had died, and in total 869 people were injured from the chaos that ensued. That morning, I felt a deep sadness that I hadn’t felt before. I texted a friend I wasn’t on good terms with to reconnect, realizing how fragile life truly is. I mourned with my friend Kristen who mourned the attack on her hometown, the streets she grew up on. I started to think about how that could happen here at Penn State—if I would be safe, who I would contact. Slowly, its imminence and omnipresence lodged itself into the back of my mind.
It was the second semester of my freshman year. On Valentine’s Day—February 14, 2018—a 19-year-old former student returned to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and started shooting students and staff with a rifle. Overall, 17 people were killed and 17 were wounded. I didn’t want to feel numb anymore. I watched the videos of parents who didn’t know where their kids were. I cried as I sat, reading the text messages of students who texted their parents, not knowing if they would ever see them again. I listened to the pleas of student leaders saying that they wanted to take action. As I tried to comprehend this tragic incident, I came across a picture that was all too familiar:
Taken at the MSD High School in Parkland, Florida, law enforcement officers escorted students out of the school as they all held onto each other. I saved this picture on my desktop, vowing to never forget what happened—and what has been happening.
Immediately after the Parkland shooting, our nation reacted with a sense of urgency. This time, students themselves became the face of the movement to end gun violence. Students like Emma González gave an incredibly moving speech calling “BS” on lawmakers and gun advocates as David Hogg took to the airwaves to demand action. Town halls and rallies were broadcast nationally as MSD students established “Never Again” as their movement to fight gun violence. A month later, over a million people marched in the streets of Washington, D.C., and across America during the March For Our Lives, a call for legislation preventing gun violence. Culturally, their movement transformed how we look at gun violence. Legislatively, nothing of substance changed.
It was this past summer, in August. There were two mass shootings within 24 hours. I watched videos of people pushing dead and wounded bodies out of Walmart on shopping carts. I listened to a man nervously ask news cameras if anyone had seen his elderly mother. It was later reported she was killed in the shooting. I wept as I listened to the story of a toddler shielded by her parents inside that Walmart—both murdered as she survived.
I texted my Dad:
20 people killed, 26 injured at a mass shooting in a Walmart in El Paso, Texas yesterday.
10 killed, 26 injured at a mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio last night.
This is becoming normal in America and I am terrified that we’ve just accepted it. This doesn’t happen in any other developed country on earth. Please pray with me for God to bring justice in this world. Please pray with me for God to give leaders the courage to act. Sadly, when I was in 8th grade and nothing changed after 24 kids were killed in Newtown, I knew our politicians didn’t really care and nothing else would make them.
It was three weeks ago on a Thursday. My junior year of college—nearly seven years since Sandy Hook. In a high school in Santa Clarita, California, a student shot 5 students and killed 2 of them. This time I knew two teachers at the middle school in that district, Bruce and Christol. They had taught the very students who were killed and wounded.
Bruce posted about the shooting on Facebook, describing being locked in their classrooms for hours as they searched for the gunman. The long wait as students were reunited with their parents. Bruce writes, “One by one, they left my room to walk toward the real world that was now uglier, scarier, and one that will never quite be the same.”
In a Facebook post, he writes:
Then the names came in. The boy who was killed was one of mine. He had also been the student of the teacher sitting next to me. She knew the name but didn’t remember his face until she pulled it up on the her phone using the school’s database. She started shaking … and then crying uncontrollably. The memories came flooding in. “He was so smart .. he was such a sweet boy.” That was all she could say between her sobs.
Whenever I think about the issue of gun violence, I always think about a tweet from Dan Hodges that is forever seared into my mind:
In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate. Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.
It is 2019. 46 weeks into this year, there have been 45 school shootings. An average of nearly one per week. So far this year, 415 people have been killed and 1,486 have been wounded in 369 mass shootings.
It will be a day. Five years from now. Ten years from now. Fifteen years from now. Your child, my child, will look over and ask us a question. They will ask us what happened. They will ask us what it was like. By then, I hope and pray that things have changed. Regardless, we will grip them tightly. But, how will we answer? What will we tell them? Why didn’t we act?
In the back of our minds, we will hope. We will hope that we never receive that text, saying that there is a shooter at their school. Telling us that they love us. We will hope that they never end up in those pictures, gripping their classmates shoulders—led by those in front of them, afraid. We will hope.
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