It happened again. This time at Covenant School in Nashville.
Yet another school shooting in America.
This must stop.
Look at the little girl in the photo above. Doesn’t she deserve better from us?
A 28-year-old woman armed with A-R-style weapons went on a murderous rampage and took the lives of three innocent 9-year-old students and three adults. One adult was a custodian, the other was a substitute teacher, and the third was head of school.
The shooter, a former student at the private Christian school, purchased seven firearms “legally and locally,” according to Police Chief John Drake. She was transgender and under a doctor’s care for emotional disorder. She lived with her parents who knew she had purchased guns in the past.
We can comfort and try to protect as we always do, but that’s not enough. We need decisive and sweeping change now. And we can’t allow ourselves to become numb.
The leading cause of death among American children and adolescents in the United States is fire-arm related injury, according to the New England Journal of Medicine. See the graph below.
Our country is sick.
If we don’t address the issue of assault weapons and prevent weapons from ending up in the hands of people such as Audrey Hale, I fear our crisis will only get worse.
And we cannot forget about what happened just over a month ago on February 13 in Michigan.
Tragically, my post below regarding that shooting last month is relevant once again.
Please take care and be safe,
Antonette
On Monday night, a disturbed man with a gun went on a murderous rampage at an American school. The shooter took the lives of three innocent Michigan State University students and critically injured five. Remarkably, authorities found a note in his backpack citing previous school shootings and discussing how he had plans to “finish off Lansing”.
Terrorizing. Horrifying. Senseless. We’re running out of words. The terror at Michigan State University marks the 67th mass shooting in America this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive. We have lost 5,200 Americans to gun violence in 2023 already, and it is only February.
Much of our society is sick, and children are needlessly dying.
As a former teacher, I experienced dozens of lockdown drills with hundreds of students, just as so many American teachers have. “THIS IS A LOCKDOWN DRILL…THIS IS ONLY A DRILL…” the administrators would declare over the intercom. Despite the best of intentions and the matter-of-fact tone, these announcements never failed to startle many of the students in my classroom. Students would often exclaim “It’s a drill!” as if to reassure themselves and one another that thankfully, by God’s grace, we would not have to face at any moment a homicidal gunman wielding an AR-15.
I would rush to the window on our door, cover it with a makeshift black screen (two pieces of black construction paper taped together and attached with a 3M Velcro Command Strip), and hurry to the corner of the room farthest from the door to huddle in silence with students in the dark.
Despite understanding we were practicing for an emergency, students often mentioned how the administrator’s shadow peeking under the crack of the door and the eery shake of the doorknob frightened them.
After drills, some students seemed to comfort themselves by discussing how they might barricade our door with desks if something ever happened. They wondered if they would need to hide the light emitted by their phones as they contacted parents to tell them they loved them. With nervous humor, they brainstormed which tools of learning — textbooks, scissors, erasers – could be used as tools of survival.
Tragedies like the one this week make many worry.
“We’ve endured too many of these tragedies in the past few years. And each time I learn the news I react not as a President, but as anybody else would -- as a parent. And that was especially true today. I know there’s not a parent in America who doesn’t feel the same overwhelming grief that I do.” Those aren’t the comments of President Biden this week. They are the words of President Barack Obama from the White House Briefing Room on December 14, 2012, in response to the murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.
President Obama reacted to the news of the Sandy Hook massacre as a parent. The emotional impact of these tragic events for us and for our children is undeniable. While many of us may feel powerless when it comes to mass gun violence, there are still things we can do to comfort our children, protect them, and begin to change our culture.
Here are a few ideas:
Comfort
My suggestions on providing comfort to children are intended for the millions of American kids who have not experienced the horror of a school shooting in close proximity, those who have indirectly experienced trauma and the effects of violence from a distance and through media reports and retellings.
“The total number of children exposed to gun violence at school has exploded, rising from 187,000 in 2018 to 338,000 now,” reported the Washington Post’s John Woodrow Cox and Steven Rich yesterday. Cox and Rich use the term “exposed” to refer to a child “who has endured a shooting at a K-12 school.”
While every such instance is one too many and these events are certainly horrific for those involved, the chances of an individual child experiencing gun violence at their school remains relatively small.
I say this, of course, not to minimize the pervasiveness of gun violence, but rather to offer parents a tool to comfort children of all ages by sharing this fact with them. We can also comfort them by answering questions and affirming feelings of sorrow and fear. Validating a child’s feelings of empathy will help them avoid becoming desensitized to such horrible acts of violence.
We can also comfort our kids by giving them opportunities to focus not solely on their own feelings, but also on the suffering of others. They can channel feelings of sadness and fear into positive empathetic behaviors. For example, parents can encourage their children to write letters of support to another child, create a card or sympathetic artwork, or contribute to a condolences drive for the school and community suffering from the latest attack. This will help raise other-focused children with compassionate hearts and a spirit of service.
Protect
As individual parents, we can try to help physically protect our children by preparing them for the worst. Talk with them about school lockdown drills and their experiences. In an age-appropriate way, have serious conversations with them about the “Run, Hide, Fight” survival approach so many schools and security experts advise.
On Monday evening, Michigan State University’s online message to students read “Run means evacuate away from danger if you can do so safely, Hide means to secure-in-place, and Fight means protect yourself if there is no other option.”
RUN. Children should instinctively ask themselves, “Did I hear shots? Where did they come from?” Find an exit located opposite the suspected location of the gunman. Go there. It may sound like common sense, but for some, fear can paralyze rather than motivate flight. Get as far away as possible. Leave belongings behind, but if possible, try to take your phone with you. When safe, call 911.
Dominik Molotky, a Michigan State student who found himself in one of the classrooms attacked by the gunman, told ABC News in an interview Tuesday on Good Morning America about how “running” or “fleeing” probably saved his life:
I was sitting next to the nearest door and thank God that my fight-or flight response kicked in because, right when that first gunshot went off, I booked it to the far corner of the class.
HIDE. If running is not an option, then hide. Hiding is about cover and concealment. Cover means getting behind something that will absorb bullets and protect us from them. Concealment means not allowing the shooter to see us. Turn off lights. Lock doors and barricade them with desks or other materials if there is time.
FIGHT. If running is not an option and the shooter has discovered your location and appears ready to resume shooting, then fight. Ideally, rally as many people as possible to ambush the shooter simultaneously from multiple directions wielding any available improvised weapons to incapacitate the shooter as quickly as possible.
This all sounds terrible and primitive, I know. But experts say the “Run, Hide, Fight” approach maximizes chances for survival.
Change
Along with comforting our children and trying to protect them physically by preparing them for worst case scenarios, we can also give them hope for the future by modeling how to help create a culture of peace rather than one that too often celebrates gratuitous violence.
What are a few things we can do as parents?
Raise our own kids well. We can raise our children well by truly prioritizing them in our lives, helping them discover their gifts and purpose, and demonstrating our unconditional love for them by being attuned to their state of mind and activities, intervening at the first sign of trouble. “I believe now that I could have done things differently,” said Sue Klebold, the mother of Dylan Klebold, one of the Columbine shooters. “I could have listened differently. I could have asked different questions. And I really believe that his participation, at least, could have been prevented.”
According to the National Council for Mental Well-Being’s 2019 report on mass violence in America, despite being a bright student who had been accepted to four colleges, “fourteen months before his death, Dylan…got in trouble for stealing something from a parked van.” Ms. Klebold was not aware that her son used drugs or drank alcohol. She discovered years after the Columbine tragedy that “Dylan had written in his journal when he was 15 that he was in agony and wanted to die. He wrote that he wanted to get a gun and that he was cutting himself.”
“I never saw signs of those, but we found it in his writings,” Mrs. Klebold said.
Reflect on the messages our actions send to our kids about violence. What types of films do our children watch us watch? What types of media material do we consume in their presence? What do we say or do in front of our children when we unexpectedly confront violence on television or in movies. Do you do a debrief with your kids after a show or movie that contains objectionable material?
If we stop and think for just a moment, many of us patronize violence in the form of film, social media, television, and print media. Our actions speak louder than our words, as they say, and our kids see our actions.
And we shouldn’t complain or be surprised when we get more violent movies and video games if we are perpetuating their creation with our money.
What to do? Stop ingesting violent media. Point it out to kids and say, “not the best choice.” If confronted with unexpected egregious violence during a film, shut it out. Turn it off. Ask them to cover their eyes or just do it yourself (I know this can be awkward with older kids - but they will probably thank you later). Use Common Sense Media and other reputable rating sites as a starting point when making media choices.
There are quite a few J.R.R. Tolkien fans in my family, but when we have watched Lord of the Rings – we skip as much of the violence as possible. We want to avoid normalizing deplorable violence that can desensitize, especially when Hollywood has marketed violent content for children.
What types of violent media are your kids ingesting, including when you are not around? What types of video games do they play? Do they routinely consume images of mayhem and destruction? What are they seeing in the digital realm? Do we know? What are we doing to find out?
Care, Watch, Act. If you notice someone in your circle of influence or even just beyond it who is really struggling – a withdrawn and angry teenager who seems deeply troubled – tell someone. Tell a parent, a counselor, a teacher. If your kids tell you about such a person at school – act. None of us would ever want to be that person who knew something before a catastrophe but failed to act to stop it.
Perpetrators often share certain characteristics, according to a 2019 study entitled Mass Violence in America:
The characteristics that most frequently occur are males, often hopeless and harboring grievances that are frequently related to work, school, finances or interpersonal relationships; feeling victimized and sympathizing with others who they perceive to be similarly mistreated; indifference to life… They frequently plan and prepare for their attack and often share information about the attack with others, though often not with the intended victims.
School shootings like the one at Michigan State University can make us feel forlorn and powerless. Instead of succumbing to such feelings, we can focus on comforting our kids, preparing them for the worst case scenario, and changing our country’s culture. Those steps can begin to salvage some good from the evil we witnessed this week.
Thanks for reading Raising Americans. Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.