Enough.

My formative years were shaped by gun violence. My son’s entire life has been shaped by it, too.

Keiko Zoll
6 min readJun 9, 2022

It was a Wednesday. I was a high school junior, not yet 17.

Throughout the day, I found myself glancing behind me, mentally noting how I could get out of any of my classrooms should the threat arise. At 16, I taught myself situational awareness because just 24 hours before, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris had murdered 12 students and one teacher before turning their guns on themselves at Columbine High School.

I was one of the class of 2000: the quintessential millennial, forever invincible — or so I believed until April 20, 1999.

My high school graduation, June 2000

This past May, I turned 40.

I’ve lived more than half my life since my junior year of high school and yet we are still talking about children being murdered in their school classrooms, as though nothing has changed in the nearly quarter of a century that’s passed since Columbine.

Because nothing. Has. Changed.

I heard about the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas at the end of the work day. My mind was elsewhere that Tuesday, thinking about dinner prep and my son’s Little League game. The breaking news alert popped up on my phone, like too many times before. The words “elementary…

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Keiko Zoll
Keiko Zoll

Written by Keiko Zoll

Where good, strong words meet good trouble.

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