The Year in School Shootings
In 2018, the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on Valentine’s Day spurred what seemed to be a newly empowered gun reform movement in America. Huge coordinated protests were held throughout the country, only a few weeks after the event, in the style of the massive Women’s Marches that had taken shape after the election of Donald Trump.
The March for Our Lives was largely the result of herculean efforts of the Parkland survivors, teens who began tweeting their disgust, outrage, and terror the day they saw their classmates and teachers die in front of them. Most of them haven’t stopped since. There had been school shootings in the United States before, of course—the first notorious mass event occurred in 1999, twenty years ago, at Columbine High School in Colorado. The shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012 took 26 lives, 20 of them children, prompting President Barack Obama to cry on television. But the Parkland kids were older, they had social media accounts, and they got organized, fast. They confronted lawmakers in their statehouse and on Capitol Hill; they excoriated the NRA, and politicians who took their money; they gave righteous, obstreperous interviews on cable TV.
It’s devastating to feel now, a year and a half later, that Parkland, and the energy of the activists who were inspired—and unwittingly made—by the tragedy there has been subsumed by the tally of gun deaths since. But living through these events in our gun-ridden country is characterized by a familiar, eerie stasis. Two years ago, I tried to calculate) my own gun violence body count, remembering the incidents that have created a kind of alternate timeline from my childhood—Columbine, the DC Sniper, Virginia Tech—to adulthood—the murder of Michael Brown, Charleston, Pulse, Vegas, the Tree of Life. There are so many more. And those are only the deaths that I learned about on the news. Once gun violence hits you personally, when someone you know is murdered or dies by gunfire, their loss obliterates politics, the sense of national emergency exploded by grief.
A tally of 2019’s “school shootings” so far is really a picture of the swirling, heaving, overwhelming totality of what gun violence actually means, here. The succinctness of the term “school shooting” belies the utter mess of just how often guns are brandished, go off, injure and kill on America’s campuses. Parkland, Newtown—these are apexes at the top of hundreds of incidents that came before and after them, as was the May 7 shooting at the STEM High School in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, the worst this year to date, at which one student was killed protecting the lives of his classmates, 8 of whom were injured.
The K-12 School Shooting Database, compiled by the Gun Advanced Thinking in Homeland Security program at the Naval Postgraduate School’s Center for Homeland Defense and Security, includes “every instance a gun is brandished, is fired, or a bullet hits school property for any reason, regardless of the number of victims, time, day of the week.” The picture it paints is morbidly mundane, in addition to being disgusting and terrifying. Some of the incidents look like the ones we know: a student brings a gun to campus in a backpack. Sometimes it goes off; many times, it does. In others, stray bullets strike school buildings, or school buses, or school bus drivers. People shoot each other or kill themselves in school parking lots. Neighbors meet at a school to discuss an extraneous matter, and one dies by handgun. Police are called, and they open fire themselves; students in lockdown and parents rushing to find them have no idea whether whatever happened will make local news, or CNN.
All those people—the students, parents, teachers, administrators, custodial workers and staff, police and other first responders—are not counted in the only tallying system we seem to understand, deaths and injury counts, which is criminally inadequate. 7 people died and 34 were injured in *32 incidents in 2019, but several thousand, at least, attend, work at, and send their children to the schools at which they occurred, institutions intended, ostensibly, to be defined by safety.
What does looking at this data inspire? For gun control to happen in the United States, nothing short of profound limitations on purchasing and selling weapons must be implemented. There are simply too many of them, an epidemic, a plague. People will lose money, and their livelihoods will change. The cost of all that, I suppose, matters. But the youngest Americans, from kindergarten through senior year, who cannot buy a gun themselves except, maybe, in their last few months in school, are bearing an enormous, incalculable weight of trauma. They are the ones paying. We’re only halfway through the year.
*Incidents as of May 21st, 2019.
Art by Joan Wong
Animations by Michel Sayegh
Originally Appeared on Vogue
