Every time one of these horrific, and increasingly regular, school shootings occur, it’s hard to prevent your mind from imagining yourself there—at Columbine High School; at Deming Middle School; at Buell Elementary School. It’s impossible not to wonder what you would do: How would you react in such a terrifying moment? Which way would you run? Would you fight back? Would you be able to survive? Could you save someone else’s life? Then the mind gravitates to another harrowing series of hypotheticals. What would you be doing right now if it was one of your kids in that school? Or a nephew or niece, or a friend, who had had their life cut short by an act of senseless violence in the very sanctuary where our society nurtures its future?
On Wednesday afternoon, as another national tragedy unfolded at the hands of an American teenager with an AR-15, the terror felt far more real for me. I attended Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School from 1991 to 1995. And as I watched the menacing footage of a deranged gunman killing people in the school, taken from brave students’ phones, I recognized each setting with chilling familiarity—the cafeteria where I ate tater tots and oblong chicken nuggets; the auditorium where I helped create props for the school play; the toilets where I smoked cigarettes with my friends while someone kept an eye out for the principal; the athletic field where I breathlessly ran, or tried to, in P.E. class. Then, as now, M.S.D. looked like any other school in the United States. You came in through the nondescript concrete entranceway; the principal’s office was to the left; the auditorium to your right. There was a capacious courtyard in the middle of the school where kids gossiped, giggled and flirted during break, and no doubt still do. The school mascot was a maroon eagle. Now, M.S.D., like so many other American schools, is another statistic, another name in the litany of places that have experienced such senseless gun violence: Maysville, Aztec, North Park, Chardon, Millard, West Nickel Mines, Santana, Thurston, Columbine, Sandy Hook, Heath High, Pearl High, Bethel High, and on it goes.
The school-shooting epidemic in our society is usually traced back to Columbine, but the truth is that the horror predates that by nearly a century. (There were random school shootings throughout the early and middle 20th century, but they were generally few and far between.) What has changed most over time, however, has been the responses to these shootings. When 18-year-old Eric Harris and 17-year-old Dylan Klebold stormed Columbine, Americans were in true shock. Those of us who were in high school or college at the time remember exactly where we were when we learned the news—where we had our own dark fears and morbid hypotheticals. Back then, Columbine seemed like a defining moment in American life: there was the aerial footage of terrified teens running across a road, away from school, their hands behind their heads, that seemed to play on repeat on CNN and other cable channels for weeks. In the ensuing days and weeks, the shooting was on the cover of magazines and newspapers, as the world looked on in horror, assuming (rightfully so), that gun-loving America would draw a line when it came to mass murders in schools.
Of course, it didn’t quite work out that way. School shootings are now a terrible recurring event in our culture that are beyond comprehension. And the political right responds to them with an alarmingly consistent message, often obfuscating or dodging—saying it’s too soon to discuss gun control after a mass shooting, or that the victims’ families need time to mourn first. It’s a way of circumnavigating the main argument—how can you separate the issues of gun control and gun violence—and punting, hoping that some inane meme from a Donald Trump tweet will distract us all and change the subject. Given the recurrence of these events, some Republican politicians, of course, have their response perfected. They offer their “thoughts and prayers” for the victims. Politicians like Marco Rubio tweet verses from the bible. Trump blames mass shootings on mental illness, while scolding victims for not reporting him earlier. Florida Governor Rick Scott, who said after the Orlando nightclub massacre that “we will do everything in our power to make sure this never happens again,” puts out a new statement: “I’m going to do everything I can to make sure this never happens again.” Meanwhile, the N.R.A. keeps supporting these politicians and getting them into office. Days from now, when fiery emotions have turned to complacency, the N.R.A. will fight back against gun control, saying that Hollywood is to blame with all their gun-toting violent movies. Or maybe it’s the fault of video games. Whatever it is, it’s not guns that kill people.
Which is—to be frank—complete and utter bullshit. America is not the only country in the world where people suffer from mental illnesses. America is not the only country with violent video games or movies full of dramatic shootouts. Yet America is the only country in the world with more than 300 million guns. We are the only country where you can be in high school and legally buy an AR-15 assault rifle, the civilian version of the fully-automatic M-16. The same gun that could be—and is and was—used in war. And America is the only country in the world where high-school students actually do buy AR-15 assault rifles and murder innocent students.
Before I attended M.S.D., I spent my formative years living in the north of England. In all the years I lived in England, I never met a single person who owned a gun. During the 1970s and 80s, I only ever heard of one mass shooting happening in the country, and that’s because there was only ever one mass shooting that happened. It was called the “Hungerford massacre,” and took place in 1987, when an unemployed antique dealer and handyman used a handgun and two semiautomatic rifles to kill 16 people, including himself, in several locations, including a school he had once attended. Immediately after the shooting took place, the U.K. government commissioned a report on how this atrocity had happened, and what they could do to stop it from happening again. Less than a year later, the government passed The Firearms Act 1988, which banned the ownership of semiautomatic rifles and added restrictions to shotguns and other firearms. Now imagine how many lives could be saved if American politicians finally did the same thing in the wake of yet another mass shooting in an American school. That, sadly, is the most important lesson I’ve learned as an alum of Marjory Stoneman Douglas.
