Santa Fe shooting

Jill Filipovic
Updated
Photo credit: Getty Images
Photo credit: Getty Images

From Cosmopolitan

It's a week day in America, and so another school shooting has taken too many young lives. The latest was at Santa Fe High School in Texas, and it left ten dead and ten more injured. One student survivor, Paige Curry, told a reporter that she wasn't all that surprised that her classmates were gunned down. "It's been happening everywhere," she said. "I felt - I've always kind of felt like eventually it was going to happen here, too."

A high school girl thinks it's inevitable that a shooter would murder her classmates. What a sad indictment of American culture and what we’ve come to believe is normal.

There is a cost to school shootings that go beyond the bodies of the dead and injured -although that cost itself is far too high. Students of all ages are paying a steep psychic price because cynical, greedy adults refuse to do anything about our gun problem. There are the students like Paige Curry, who deal with the grief of lost friends. But there are also students like Paige Curry, who are already living in a state of low-level anxiety every time they walk into a school building. With every active shooter drill and every lockdown, every story of another school shooting elsewhere in the country, that anxiety builds.

We don't have good research on how this new normal impacts students. But we do know that prolonged exposure to stress is terrible for our health, linked to everything from heart disease to depression to early death. It's not enough that American kids are being killed by guns; we're also slowly wreaking havoc on their minds and bodies by refusing to do anything about the pervasive threat of gun violence.

With every school shooting, we need to ask: Is this worth it? One can both want Americans to have the freedom to own guns and also support the kind of common-sense gun laws that would decrease both the number of these tragic events and the body count at each one. The U.S. is a global outlier in gun deaths, and it's simply because we have far too many guns, and guns are far too easy to get.

Stricter rules for licensing gun ownership, including a minimum age to purchase and own a gun, mandatory safety training courses, a safety and competence test (just like a driving test), and mandatory insurance would all go a long way. So too would mandatory safekeeping requirements, as well as outlawing what are more or less military-grade weapons for civilian use. We could also establish a high bar to gun ownership for those convicted of crimes or subject to domestic violence protective orders, and the ability to hold gun manufacturers liable for the deaths their products cause. Mandatory background checks, including for private gun sales, should be a no-brainer. Individuals who are concerned about the psychological well-being or the violent tendencies of a family member should be able to flag problematic behavior and seek a court order temporarily restricting that person from gun ownership.

We could do any combination of these things. Instead, because of the power of the NRA, its stranglehold on the Republican Party, and our increasingly fractured society, it doesn't seem like sane gun control is coming anytime soon.

And so instead there are students like Paige Curry, who is psychologically traumatized now after witnessing a shooting, but who has been living in a constant state of stress well before this week. There are parents who live in fear of their own child being killed or injured in a place they should be safe. And there is a political establishment, a powerful special interest lobby, and even a critical number of callous voters (a great number of them in places like Texas) who simply shrug and prefer to do nothing.

American students expect that they may someday be shot in their schools. What a nauseating national shame.

Jill Filipovic is the author of The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness. Follow her on Twitter.

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