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I was twenty-two years old on April 20, 1999, the Monday morning when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walked into Columbine High School and killed twelve students and a teacher. I was far enough out of high school to not think That could have been me but close enough to high school to think about it. In my mind, I surveyed the courtyard at my old high school where we ate lunch, taking note of each face. Could it have been him? Could it have been him? Tragic as the Columbine shooting was, it didn’t affect me personally, and like so many other twenty-two-year-olds, I dismissed the event soon after it happened.
Fast forward from April 20, 1999, to December 14, 2012. That morning, twenty-year-old Adam Lanza killed his mother at her home, then drove to Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, where he massacred twenty students and six adults before killing himself. The students were all between the ages of six and seven.
On October 1, 2015, a twenty-six-year-old student, Chris Harper-Mercer shot an assistant professor and eight students at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon. He injured another eight students before being engaged by local authorities. Harper-Mercer took his own life like Klebold, Harris, and Lanza had done before him.
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I have a twenty-one-year-old daughter and a twelve-year-old son. In 2015, when Chris Harper-Mercer entered a community college classroom and opened fire, my daughter was in her first semester at a community college in Clearwater, Florida. When Adam Lanza murdered twenty first-graders in Newtown Connecticut, my son was a six-year-old first grader in Tampa, Florida.
According to a 20/20 special from 2016, there have been 270 school shootings, of some kind, since Columbine, with fifty of those being classified as mass shootings. The government defines a mass shooting as four or more people being injured in a single event. According to this same article, 141 students have been killed by a mass shooting since Columbine. These figures do not include the last two-plus years, including the 17 shootings in 2018 alone, nor do the figures include the 17 fatalities at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School last month.
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Last Sunday, my son and I were at breakfast, discussing the important things in life to most twelve-year-old kids: video games. He was explaining a Monster Hunter World dragon when something on the television above and behind me caught his eye. It was a news story about the survivors of the Parkland, Florida shooting. I saw his demeanor change, and I took the opportunity to have him explore his own feelings about the event.
My son and I go to breakfast every Sunday morning, just him and I. We invented a game using jelly packets which we call Jelly Ball. To him, the one on one time is more about destroying me at this game, and explaining the different creatures he is going to destroy in whichever game he is playing that weekend. But to me, it gives me an opportunity to weave in questions about life that I might not otherwise get an honest response to. It is a time for us to talk, father with son, friend to friend.
During our talk about the Florida shooting, I asked him if his school has an emergency protocol.
“Do you have an active shooter drill at your school?”
“We call it a lockdown drill, but I guess it’s the same thing.”
“Tell me about it?”
He did. Step by step protocol of what the teachers do, as well as the students, including alternatives for extreme cases. As he explained the steps to me, even-keeled and with the precision of a carpenter, my insides tied themselves into knots. What struck me, as much as the lockdown drill itself, was how normal the procedure was to him. It was as if he was explaining a fire drill. In reading about the Sandy Hook shooting, reports show that dozens of students were saved because the school had designated lockdown procedures which were followed by both staff and students. When I was in grade school, in the early eighties, I remember practicing “tornado drills” in school, which my older sister later explained to me were nuclear bomb drills. Not only do I not remember lock down drills in school, I’m not sure any of our doors even locked.
Last month, when Nikolas Cruz took the lives of so many innocent students at Stoneman Douglas High School, I felt something to which I was not accustomed. My wife would later give words to that feeling. “Numb,” she said. “I just feel numb.” After Sandy Hook, once the devastation of the event had lessened (it has never disappeared), we thought there would be new laws, new protocols put in place to prevent this from happening. Was it the time to limit or ban weapons? Was it time to really focus on mental health? Was it time to rethink our cultural obsession with guns? Yes. The answer to all of these is yes. Yet nothing was done.
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This isn’t a column to blame the gun lobby or lawmakers for not acting, but, as my father always said, “If the shoe fits.” So, when someone goes into an LGBTQ nightclub and massacres innocent dancers, or an individual opens fire from a casino window on concert goers, or when a gunman goes into a California conference center at a non-profit and kills 14 and wounds another 22, we begin to build up a tolerance. Perhaps it is to protect the self from such heartbreak. Perhaps it is to be able to live some sense of normal. Perhaps we know the gun lobby is too strong and nothing will ever be done.
What do we do as fathers, as mothers, as humans? We hold our children a little tighter. Stay for an extra song when tucking them in. Cry when we drop them off at their elementary school. All of these things. And then we get at it. As a parent, as a father, it is my duty to protect my family, a duty that I take very seriously.
I don’t know what the solutions to the problems are in this country I don’t pretend to have any answers. I can’t tell you that we should ban semi-automatic weapons, or limit clip sizes, or make licensing laws stricter. I can’t tell you that I think you should be required to obtain licensing and insurance for every firearm. I believe all of these things. I wish all of these things would happen. But more than that, I don’t want to spend all day worrying about my children at school, or at work, or at a nightclub, or a concert. I don’t want to worry about your children or partners, or parents or friends at these places either.
Today, hundreds of thousands of people will gather all over he country today and march for peace. These marches are led by our children, our sons and daughters who have the courage to stand up for something that we as adults have been unwilling to do. The are willing to stand up and say no to the blatant disregard for their safety. These children rise up today and use their collective voices, and in November will use their collective votes. It takes immense bravery to stand up to your oppressors. It takes courage to take on the power structure. As a parent, I have never been more proud. Their parents are proud too.
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Photo credit: Getty Images