14 years old

We’ve endured so many school shootings and mass shootings in this country over the last 26 years that it’s almost superfluous to write the rest of the sentence:  that it was a boy who opened fire in his high school in Winder, Georgia, earlier today, killing two students and two teachers and wounding eight more students and another teacher.  If you’ve been reading my column for a while, you know the story by heart: 

Jonesboro, Arkansas, 1998 – five dead, 10 wounded, shot by 11 and 13-year-old boys using nine guns and 2,000 rounds of ammunition taken from one of the boy’s grandfather’s house.

Columbine, Colorado, 1999 – twelve dead and 21 wounded by two 18-year-old male students using four guns.

Those were the two big shootings everyone remembers from the beginning of the 25 years of blood spilled in American schools by children and young men firing guns at school children.  Forgotten by most of us are two other shootings from 1997, one in Pearl, Mississippi, when a 16-year-old boy killed two students and wounded seven others, the second in West Paducah, Kentucky, when a 14-year-old boy used a gun to kill three high school students and wound five more.

And on it went.

Sandy Hook school in Newtown, Connecticut – 26 first graders and six adults killed by a 20-year-old male who killed his own mother earlier the same day. 

Parkland, Florida – a 19-year-old male former student killed 14 students and three staff members and wounded 17 others.

Uvalde, Texas – 19 children and two teachers killed and 17 wounded by an 18-year-old male former student. 

Those are the ones that jump out in our memories.  But do you remember the school shooting in Aztec, New Mexico in 2017, when a former male student sneaked into his high school and killed two students before killing himself? 

Or how about the 2018 school shooting in Marshall County, Kentucky, when a 15-year-old male student shot 16 people in the lobby of his high school, killing two students and wounding 14. 

Did you hear about the shooting outside an elementary school in Union City, California in 2019, when two boys, aged 11 and 14, were killed as they sat in a minivan in the parking lot?  Two boys, one 17, the other 18, were later arrested for the killings.

I’ll bet you didn’t read about the 2021 shooting in Wilmington, California, when a 12-year-old boy was killed and his stepmother wounded as they sat in their car in the school parking lot.  A nine-year-old girl playing on the school playground was wounded by a stray bullet.  Police said dozens of bullets were fired in a gangland-style attack.  No arrests were made.

There was another under-the-radar school shooting in St. Louis, Missouri in 2022.  A 19-year-old male former student walked into the Central Visual and Performing Arts High School carrying an AR-15 rifle and a dozen 30-round magazines and opened fire in a classroom, killing a 15-year-old girl and a 61-year-old physed teacher.  He wounded four others and three more were injured – one student broke his ankle jumping out of a second-story window.

Is it any wonder that yet another school shooting by a 14-year-old boy bounced around the newsfeed for a couple of hours this afternoon, before being buried by more horrors from Gaza, another outrageous statement by Donald Trump, and an insider account of how Trump and RFK Jr. came to their meeting of addled minds?

There is late breaking news – The FBI was warned a year ago that the Georgia shooter had posted threats of a school shooting on social media.  He and his father were interviewed.  The boy, then 13, denied making the social media posts.  The father told the FBI there were guns in the house, but they were kept locked up.

There are too many guns.  There is too much access to these guns by young men with a fight to pick against the world and a nearby school for a place to start the fight.  There is way, way too much apathy about all of the ongoing crises – the guns and the pissed-off boys and the parents who don’t secure their guns and the laws that allow 18-year-olds to walk into a gun store and put down a drivers license and $1,500 and walk out with a high-powered rifle that was designed for the military to use in wars against foreign enemies and enough ammunition to arm an infantry platoon.

It's never going to end.  There is an entire political party dedicated to the proposition that it’s all okay because a poorly written clause in the Constitution says it’s okay.  So, next week, or maybe next month, but certainly next year, there will be another school shooting somewhere in America.  Children will die in classrooms, or in school bathrooms, or in hallways, or on sports fields, or in school parking lots, or on the sidewalks outside schools. Blood will flow. Tears will be shed.

Cops will be called, investigations undertaken, newspaper stories written.  There will be images of children crying and frantic parents and hearts-and-prayers police chiefs and sheriffs and politicians.  Maybe, after several years of pressure by the parents of the dead children, someone will be fired.  Or may be not. But the politicians who pass the laws that allow the gun sales to 18-year-olds, the judges who interpret the ancient poorly written clause in the Constitution, and the rest of us…

We’ll go on.  If you have a child in school, as I do, you’ll be left with hope and not much else that your child will survive to graduate and become an adult and leave these killing fields we call schools.

That is the America we live in.  I would ask God to help us, but he or she doesn’t have anything to do with it.  It’s on us.