Enough.
I was 11 years old, in the final weeks of Sixth Grade. Nothing about the day was remarkable until there was some bustle about pulling the window shades down, staying inside, and not going home unless one of our parents came to pick us up. About half an hour after the rest of our classmates were picked up, Michael’s mom arrived to get him and offered to bring me home. I made a piece of toast, sprinkled some cinnamon and sugar on it, smeared it with a little melted butter, and wandered into the den to flip through the afternoon TV lineup, usually a mix of Phil Donahue, Oprah Winfrey, music videos from 4:00–5:00 on channel 55 (we didn’t have cable). All channels (well, not 55, but I didn’t make it that far) had cut into regular programming with live coverage of unfolding events in Winnetka. My hometown.
You see, that morning, Laurie Dann planted a bomb that started a small fire in an elementary school in Highland Park, a few towns up the road, while the two children she babysat waited in the car. Then she tried to poison the kids and locked them and their mother in the basement of their home before she set on fire. Then she drove to Hubbard Woods Elementary School with three handguns, shot one boy in a bathroom and five others in a classroom, killing 8 year old Nick Corwin. She fled but a funeral procession blocked her route, and she made her way into the home of the Andrews family.
I watched on TV a tense scene of armed police surrounding a suburban house, about 2 miles from me. I’d ridden my bike past Kent Road many times before, on the way to play practice at the Community House or to the ice rink and fields nearby. I knew the Andrews family — the youngest kid and I used to do our homework together on hallway floors while our older brothers competed in swim meets or water polo matches. Other pieces started to fall into place, too. Frat houses at Northwestern reported the delivery of arsenic-laced Rice Krispie treats and Capri Suns. Parents reported strange invitations in previous days to bring their children to Hubbard Woods Elementary for a casting call.
I watched Mrs. Andrews run out of the house.
I watched 20 year old Phil stumble out of the house, shot.
I watched the police wait, and wait.
By that time, my parents were home, and we ate dinner, away from the TV, while a SWAT team entered the house and found Laurie Dann dead from a self-inflicted gunshot in an upstairs bedroom.
My swim-meet-homework-buddy and I went to high school together. We had classes together, we ate lunch together occasionally. Sometimes I asked him how his older brother was, but I never asked him what I really wanted to know.
My oldest brother moved back in for a short stint, something about being between apartments, or between jobs, or between betweens. My family ate dinner at 6:00pm, and around quarter-til our custom was to meander into the kitchen, pretend to offer help with dinner, and set things on the table. My dad would come down in his post-work-Mr. Rogers-like-costume-change (he’d swap his jacket, tie, and Oxfords for a v-neck sweater, an open collar, and loafers) and, scotch on the rocks with a little bit of water in one hand, deliver a vodka on the rocks with a little bit of water to my mother.
One unremarkable day, a few minutes before dinner was ready, all four of us were in the kitchen, waiting for the last bits of dinner to be ready, and the conversation turned to collecting guns. My dander went up — you see, I’d declared pacifism when I was 9 (not knowing what it meant), and by the time I was 15 I’d developed a knack for being righteously outraged in a split second. My brother talked about a plan to buy one or two guns to start a collection and to keep in the house (at that point, there was no end date for this round of betweens). I looked at him, astonished, probably dramatically-so, and turned to my mother to declare, “I won’t live in a house with a gun in it.” He laughed, intending to mock my naivete and get under my skin in the way that only older-brothers know how to do, and I looked him square in the eyes and asserted, “I will not live in a house with a gun.”
“Where are you going to go?” he responded. It was a good question — I didn’t have an exit strategy — and I mumbled something about moving in with another sibling who lived nearby (one of the benefits of being the youngest of 10 is that, with all probability, there’s always another sibling around to fill a gap or to take the blame).
I was in high school from August 1990 until May 1994. During that window, there were 47 school shootings in the United States.
For students about to graduate from high school today, there have been 106 school shootings in the United States since they started Ninth Grade.
When I was in college, my dad took me on a pilgrimage to Israel with his parish. A number of things is seared into my memory: sunrise over the beach in Tel Aviv, the smell of the olives in the Carmel Market, the view from the cliff of Masada and the silky feel of the water in the Dead Sea, the clutter and tangible tension of the Holy Sepulchre, singing “Amazing Grace” a capella in a medieval church, the warmth of the Western Wall of the Temple and the gleam of the Dome of the Rock aboe, the rifles that teachers slung over their shoulders when accompanying school groups on field trips or moving through Jerusalem.
I started teaching two and a half years after Columbine (do we even describe it as a shooting anymore? It’s just…Columbine). For the first time, I was on the other side of the drills — I had my classlists printed and folded in my wallet to take attendance during fire drills, and walking to class or sitting at lunch, I’d assess the fastest way out of the building in case of an emergency. After I saw Bowling for Columbine, I checked the drop from my classroom window to the grass below and visualized getting students out to scale down the facade. I shuddered at the news of armed security officers being installed in high schools and of efforts to equip teachers with firearms.
I took on my first administrative role at a school outside DC in 2010. The sniper attacks and series of lockdowns that ensued, from 8 years before, were still fresh in my colleagues’ memories. As part of the school’s management team, I helped conduct emergency drills — fire drills, lockdowns, sheltering in place. Sometimes, I’d be tasked with monitoring the outside of the building to see that classroom blinds had been pulled down and lights turned off, but usually, a minute or two after a lockdown drill was announced, I’d move slowly through a hallway and check that classroom and office doors were locked, that blinds were pulled over the doors and that no one was in sight. I’d walk slowly, conscious that my heels against the hard floor were the only sound in this part of the usually-humming-with-activity building. Occasionally a classroom door wasn’t fully locked, and I’d open the door to find a teacher huddling with her students in a dark corner of the classroom. The look on students’ faces, whether they were 7 or 17, was a mix of shock, surprise, and fear, and the look on the teachers’ faces was the same, but with a heavy dose of self-blame for not securing the room properly.
The look on their faces…
On a December morning in 2012, two colleagues and I worked off campus to get through a project. Just as we were starting to wrap up, we were alerted about a school shooting in Connecticut. By the time I made it home that afternoon, cable news and local channels were in full-coverage mode, and I learned that a 20 year old man killed his mother with her gun, drove to Sandy Hook Elementary School, and killed 20 children and 6 women before killing himself.
Coverage in the days that followed emphasized that the school did everything right. Security and emergency protocols had been updated and practiced. Staff responded quickly and as they’d been instructed. “It could have been so much worse,” I heard over and over. They did everything right.
Did you know that there have been so many school shootings in the United States that there are multiple separate Wikipedia pages just listing them — one for shootings before 2000, one for after. They’re sorted by decade so it’s easier to zero in on information or particular names. It’s an absurd statistic to cite, isn’t it? But the shootings themselves, the lives lost, the people traumatized and haunted, the communities impacted don’t seem to be enough to impel change.
On March 23, 2021, 10 people were killed in a grocery store in Boulder. A week earlier, 8 people were killed at multiple sites in a rampage by a lone shooter. Unlike what I’ve reflected on here, these were not school shootings, but I can’t intellectually or emotionally wrap my mind around the broader statistics around shootings in the US. I can barely stomach revisiting the stories of children and school staff gunned down by lone or pairs of shooters, but I can’t muster the courage to look for collated data on shootings in urban settings, in rural settings, in contexts of domestic or relationship violence…is there a context that hasn’t? I can’t bring myself to revisit the headlines that grieve the loss of White children or the editorials lamenting the lack of attention Black children and other children of color who don’t make the headlines.
With each new shooting, though, I’m back in that place between fear and possibility. I see and hear and feel everything I felt then. When I learned about El Paso, about Las Vegas, about Pittsburgh, about Orlando, about Aurora. When I learned about Parkland…my God, when I learned about Parkland…
I return to my 11 year old self. I can see the TV and the cinnamon toast that I’d stopped eating. I can remember thinking, was she coming to my school next?
I return to myself as a young teacher and imagine being trapped in my classroom. I debate whether to push my students out the window or to stay, huddled together.
I return to myself as an administrator and imagine an alert over the radios that we carried at all times for emergency communications. I picture an attacker walking slowly down the halls I’d once patrolled, trying door handles and jolting huddled students and teachers inside. I debate whether to run toward the shooters to distract them or to run away. I’m not always happy with the choice I make in that fantasy.
I shouldn’t have to, but I do, and I’m always left with a question, when is it enough?
