A few weeks ago, my wife and I were sitting in the living room enjoying our evening T.V. when my mom messaged me about a school shooting in Nashville, TN. She was worried about her friend’s grandchildren who happened to live in the area and didn’t know if Covenant School was the school they attended. “There was a school shooting in Nashville?” I asked. “Apparently so,” my wife replied. My reaction to this news shocked me as soon as I uttered it. 

“Hm.” 

Hm. That was it. There was nothing else to say. Soon after, the impassivity of my reaction after hearing that kids, LITTLE kids had just been shot to death at school, hit me. Hm. What a sad and telling moment it was to where we are in society. 

I remember the Columbine High School massacre vividly. At the time in 1999, it was the deadliest mass shooting to occur in a school in decades. I remember watching the news footage of kids running out of the building with their hands folded behind their heads; I remember the interviews they gave about watching their friends get shot right in front of them; I remember the young man who crawled out of the 2nd story library window and fell into the arms of the police officers waiting below. I remember hearing Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold’s names and seeing their faces repeatedly shown in the following days during news reports. 

In the weeks and months after the event I remember the phrase “trench-coat mafia” floating around, shock-rockers like Marilyn Manson being blamed for encouraging violent behavior, hearing that the shooters were bullied and had hung with the kids that wore all black and were labeled “goth.” I remember “Columbine, Friend of Mine” by Jonathon and Stephen Cohen being played on the radio. I remember the question being brought up of should we have metal detectors in schools. I remember that you could no longer make jokes about guns or shooting someone. If you did slip up and make a joke, you were given looks of shame and fear. I remember my Grandma asking me if anyone at my school wore a trench-coat. I remember my Dad asking me if I was scared to enter High School in the fall after what had happened. My answer was no. I was 14 years old and still too young and naive to be able to relate what had happened across the country to my own school. Stuff that was on the news was worlds away from my little corner.  

I remember the dark and sickening feeling I had when hearing about the Sandy Hook massacre in 2012. It was a different feeling than I had had with Columbine. This was a deeper level of horror. It was a higher number of deaths among a younger group of children. It was truly unbelievable. I couldn’t let it sink in the same way Columbine had. I was older and understood a lot more. Events on the news weren’t so far away anymore. I don’t have any children of my own, and events like that one make me not want to. 

Just 11 months ago, my wife, mom and I sat and watched the news for hours the day of the shooting in Uvalde, TX. I talked to a friend about it the next day and said how I couldn’t believe that here we were, 23 years after the Columbine shooting, dealing with the same unbelievably fucked up situation.  

I obviously didn’t mention every single school shooting that has occurred since 1999. We’ve seen the footage of children running out of the schools, being told to look the other way so they wouldn’t see their classmates bleeding to death; we’ve seen footage of devastated parents being detained for trying to run inside the school to rescue their children; we can now watch bodycam footage of the moment the police take down the suspect; we can now watch live streamed footage on social media of people getting shot and killed during a work meeting.

If someone would’ve asked me 24 years ago if things would be different in March of 2023, that somehow something would change to prevent little kids from being murdered while at school, or at the VERY least, make it less likely to happen, I would’ve said ‘definitely!’ In 2012 I would’ve said, ‘surely THIS will open up people’s eyes.’ In 2022… I said that I bet things wouldn’t change one bit. 

And they haven’t. 

In 2023, we have news anchor Joylyn Bukovac describing, as she is covering the Nashville shooting, how she survived a school shooting as a child. We have Louisville mayor Craig Greenberg addressing the family of the victims of the shooting on April 10th disclosing that he himself is a survivor of a workplace shooting. In 2018 there was a shooting in a school district directly next door to where I went to high school. It turns out my mom’s friend’s grandchildren went to a neighboring school of the Covenant School in Nashville. They attended Sunday school and were friends with one of the young girls killed on March 27th. 

In 2023, I am lost for words.

It is becoming the six degrees of shooting survivors in our society. I won’t speak for anyone else. We all have different memories and experiences following major news events. We all have different opinions on gun violence, on politics, on religion. I don’t care about those things. Kids are dying. The horror we saw unfold on April 20th 1999 was only the beginning of a new era. An era that I can’t BELIEVE we are still in. An era in which I am so desensitized to kids STILL dying at school, that I barely bat an eye. 

What the hell are we doing?