Another day, another school shooting. Don’t worry if you missed it, there will be plenty of others. Maybe next week. Or next month. Or maybe even tomorrow.
It’s ordinary now, to go to grammar school, high school, or college and expect that a student might turn into a rabid John Wayne. It’s a graduation requirement now that you know what to do if a guy with a gun comes into the library, or the art room, or shows up in the fucking hallway telling you that he’s going to kill you. Kill you, right there in the confines of the place your parents send you to because for years and years it’s been a place that was safe to spend the day learning.
But it’s different now. Now it’s different.
We have lockdown drills. We had one just the other day at Brookline High School, which my daughter missed because we were visiting her brother at a big university where a gunman could show up tomorrow. Or tonight. Who knows. It’s a thing now. It’s a thing to kill people at school. Kids at school. KIll them dead, because you’re depressed, or because you’re unhappy, or because nobody is paying enough attention to you to notice that you need some assistance, or just because you can get a gun, and in moment of despair, that gun can speak the words that you cannot.
This is our country 2014-style. Kids not only have to cope with being cool, they have to cope with thinking about who it is in their class that might bring a gun to school tomorrow and kill them. Um. Yeah.
And what are we doing, we adults, we educated adults, educated during a time when people brought lunch boxes to school and not weapons, WHAT ARE WE DOING ABOUT THIS?
I can tell you what we should be doing. We should be standing in the middle of every street in D.C. until there are stricter gun laws and improved mental health care coverage. We should stand there and block traffic with signs, screaming at the top of our lungs. Because this, killing kids, in the prime of their lives, in the place they go to learn, is unacceptable. It’s just fucking unacceptable. What’s it going to take to get you there? A text from your own child that says: “There’s a gunman in the library. I love you.”
*the gratitude-a-thon 
Oh Toni …so true ( sadly) that gun control & gun violence are not a priority & politics + the NRA are leading the way to an increasing number of guns out there- everywhere.
Where can anyone really feel safe today ?
It was appalling that the Sandy Hood parents lobbying efforts & strong voices didn’t move politicians to change a thing & even now, again, every school shooting drops out of sight.
I miss Pierce Morgan. He was the only one who kept the gun violence story going.
Xo
Oops…Piers Morgan
i know, he was good on that front. it’s just pathetic. really and truly disgusting. we’re becoming immune. that’s the saddest part. it’s not so horrific anymore, but instead has been downgraded to a somewhat “expected shame.” something has got to change.