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Abstract
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Yet another school shooting, yet another mass shooting, yet another one and another one and another one… Will this carnage ever stop? Which school will be next?
Every morning, when I pick up The New York Times, headlines record various shootings, stabbings, and related deaths that took place across the state and the country with frightening regularity. The journalists telling and retelling these violent stories are perhaps desensitized; but as educators, stories of these shootings escalate our helplessness. Simply put, gun violence is now woven into the fabric of America's culture--it is a way of life and death (Gopnik, 2017).
Scrolling through the K-12 School Shooting Database research project (Center for Homeland Defense and Security, n.d.), I learned that it "document[s] each and every instance a gun is brandished, is fired, or a bullet hits a K-12 school property for any reason, regardless of the number of victims, time, day of the week" ("About the CHDS K-12 School Shooting Database" section, para. 1).1 Exactly 10 years after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, it was Robb Elementary School's turn in Uvalde, Texas. The carnage in Uvalde marks the 188th school shooting in the United States since 1970. More than 311,000 students have experienced gun violence at their schools since the 1999 Columbine High School shooting (Cox et al., 2022).
The horrific imagery of dead innocent schoolchildren in pools of blood does not phase our heartless Congress to pull America's schools out of the graveyard of the gun control movement (Winter, 2022). The children who witnessed these horrors, and those youngsters who have not yet experienced gun violence, are growing up as members of the mass shooting generation. We now live in a country and culture in which grade school children are routinely drilled about what to do in the presence of an active shooter. These active shooter and safety drills have changed the way we view our institutional surroundings, albeit with a bit of skepticism and underlying fear of which school will be the next target...
Language: en |