I was in high school when the Columbine shooting happened
We didn’t find out about it on twitter. The victims weren’t broadcasting as it happened. I remember reading the newspaper in my parents’ kitchen the next day. Standing, pacing, in disbelief and disgust. I remember being dumbfounded.
Back then, people still referred to mass shootings as “going postal”—after a handful of high-profile workplace shootings by post office workers in the 80s and 90s.
After Columbine, nothing changed at my school across the country in Virginia. I don’t remember any discussions about violence prevention or new security policies. The most I remember was that a few school districts banned trench coats, following early reports that the shooters were members of a clique called the “Trenchcoat Mafia” (which turned out to be false, though I didn’t learn that until googling it just now). We mocked the idea that their attire had anything to do with it. We still cringed that the The Matrix (released a few weeks prior) featured trench coat-clad heroes with a surplus of firepower.
It’s been almost two decades since the Columbine massacre. Every shooting shocks the conscience in a new way. A university. A church. A nightclub. An elementary school.
But somehow Marjory Stoneman Douglas hit me harder when I realize that none of those students had been born yet in 1999. We’ve gone a full generation since Columbine.
Are we going to let another generation pass with no response? The other reason why this shooting hit me harder than most: I’m sitting here reading the news with an eight-week old baby on my lap, wondering if I need to homeschool her to keep her safe.
Hope lies in the current generation of high school students. The survivors from last week are organizing and mobilizing. They’re hearing the obfuscations and distractions coming from the NRA and the president—arming teachers? really?—and they’re just not having it.
We need sensible gun control. We need to dismantle the power of the NRA. We need to take victories where we can at the state and local level now. And we need to vote in November.
