Again

Again. Again and again and again.

I’ve written about this before and didn’t expect to be writing about it again. But it happened again, and it will keep happening.

A week ago, a troubled 14-year-old boy shot and killed four people in a public school. Nine others were wounded and hospitalized. According to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation director, he used an AR-platform weapon. The shooting is at least the 45th school shooting in 2024 and the deadliest this year, according to a CNN analysis. (cnn.com)

In tragedies like these, it is important to note that even the survivors and their loved ones are traumatized. “As students huddled, they called and texted each other and their parents. More than a few sent what they feared would be farewells.” (apnews.com) The aftermath will haunt them, as it has haunted others.

Since school shootings have become increasingly common, schools have resorted to active shooter drills. They are trying to keep students safe, but these drills have their own unintended consequences. “Active shooter drills in schools are associated with increases in depression (39%), stress and anxiety (42%), and physiological health problems (23%) overall, including children from as young as five years old up to high schoolers, their parents, and teachers. Concerns over death increased by 22 percent, with words like blood, pain, clinics, and pills becoming a consistent feature of social media posts in school communities in the 90 days after a school drill.” (everytownresearch.org) A Pew Research Center survey finds that 57% percent of US teens reported in 2018 that they were worried a shooting could happen at their school, with one in four being “very worried.” (cnn.com2) “If you enter the school system as a 3-year-old, and you exit as an 18-year-old, you will have done 60 lockdown drills,” Robert Murtfeld, a parent in New York advocating for the new law, told Chalkbeat . (thehill.com) Is this what we want for our children? Don’t they deserve better?

The Republican response, once again, turns to thoughts and prayers, not policies and actions. J.D. Vance called school shootings “a fact of life,” as if they are unavoidable.  Trump says, ““These cherished children were taken from us far too soon by a sick and deranged monster,” conveniently ignoring the root causes and government’s inaction. (nytimes.com) Those comments are only marginally better than his reaction to the Perry, Iowa, school shooting: “It’s just horrible – so surprising to see it here. But we have to get over it. We have to move forward.” (theguardian.com)  Try telling that to the victims’ families, to the survivors, to a community in shock. Let’s just pretend it didn’t happen?

Senator Raphael Warnock offered a very different response: “JD Vance claims that this kind of random, routine carnage is a fact of life. No, it’s not. It’s a fact of American life. This, again, is a tragic form of American exceptionalism.” (thehill.com2)

Warnock is not wrong about this unfortunate kind of exceptionalism. The United States has more school shootings than other industrialized nation. According to a CNN analysis published in 2018, in the previous nine years, the United States had about 57 times as many school shootings as Canada, Japan, Germany, Italy, France and the United Kingdom combined. (cnn2) According to federal data, a record 188 school shootings occurred during the 2021-22 academic year alone. More than 357,000 students have experienced gun violence at school since the1999 Columbine High School shooting. (youthtoday.org)

Guns continue to be the leading cause of death for US children and teens since surpassing car accidents in 2020. (cnn.com3) Yet we continue to do nothing more than offer empty words. Jen Rubin says that the new technique of “prosecuting people related to the shooter deflects from the grotesque public policy failure: ready access to such weapons. Treating these incidents as individual crimes, with a subsequent search for a specific person to blame, allows the real culprits — the gun lobby and the weak-kneed Second Amendment absolutists, as well as the hyper-partisan Supreme Court — off the hook.” (washingtonpost.com)

While school shootings “represent a small sliver of the number of gun deaths, but they comprise a huge share of the psychological toll gun violence takes on us, especially younger Americans.” And taking steps to curb school shootings, like red flag laws, storage requirements, better background checks, and banning assault weapons, have the potential to reduce all gun deaths. Isaac Saul, editor of the Tangle newsletter, says it well: “We cannot solve gun violence with a single change. This will require a holistic societal fix. We need to better enforce the laws we have on the books. We need to support new laws that allow family and friends to easily flag warning signs to law enforcement. We need more robust mental health treatment (for teenagers, especially young men). We need gun ownership and training to be more like using a car and less like shopping at Wal-Mart. We need our politicians and celebrities and cultural leaders to treat gun ownership as a grave, monumental responsibility, not one to be flaunted or flexed.” (readtangle.com)

Our November election has become a wide-ranging referendum. If we want our children to feel safe in school, to be safe in school, we have a party ready to tackle gun safety. The time is now. It’s up to us to make this happen.