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Enough.
My formative years were shaped by gun violence. My son’s entire life has been shaped by it, too.
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.
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 school” stuck out to me, as if my brain couldn’t compute those two words in such close proximity to “shooting.”
Didn’t we do this before? Wasn’t it all supposed to end after Sandy Hook?
As I got my nine-year-old son out the door, I told him what happened without hesitation.
“Another shooting?” he said, in disbelief.
I nodded grimly, checking the rearview mirror as I pulled out from our driveway. “Yup, another school shooting.”
“Why do they keep happening?”
“I don’t know,” I said, unsure of to whom I was really saying that aloud.
Shortly after my son turned three, a homophobic terrorist shot and killed 49 people in the Pulse nightclub in…
