On School Shootings and Stories That Never End

Columbine happened not long after I graduated from high school, and it disturbed me to the core. While it wasn’t the first such mass shooting, it was the one that slapped me awake. Nor did it seem outside the realm of possibility for it to have happened in the school I had just graduated from. After all, there weren’t (and aren’t) all that many dissimilarities between a suburb in Minneapolis and a suburb in Denver.

The following year, I began working through my confusion in the way I knew best, by writing. I didn’t really know what I was going to say, just that something needed to be said. What can lead someone to go to a school full of people they know and try to kill them? What does this say about us, the society where this is possible? I was horrified by these questions and not particularly sure if (or what) my answers would be, but I was determined to try.

It took a long time to write my book. A long time. Part of this was needing to figure out my writer self, but part of it was finding what needed to be said. Community was a part of it, some wise part of me seemed to know (I knew it before I even realized how true it was). These things don’t just affect one or two people, but everyone: the school and its local area, the state, the country, even the world.

So I had to discover my fictional community and write stories about it. From one character and his relationships, I found another and another, until I found I was slowly uncovering an entire tapestry of stories, one that I could never completely reveal (or could be written about in just one book). But I had, at last, a book that suggested at that larger collection of untold tales.

In all these years since I began writing, things have only gotten worse. As the New York Times noted, the shooting in Benton, Kentucky, on January 23rd was the eleventh of this year. The eleventh, just twenty-three days in.

And we’re past that count now in February, aren’t we?

For all that regularity, however, we’re no better at dealing with these things. We may make our schools—those who work there and study there—undergo active shooter drills, but as far as actual prevention, or coping goes? If anything, we’re regressing. We are so inured to the fact of these things that we almost have our responses down pat. The battle lines are drawn, and it’s World War I trench warfare at its worst.

In all the tumult of one side denouncing the other, however, I don’t see as much discussion of the most important aspect of the problem. Gun control certainly is a part of it (and there is a possible bridge between responsible gun ownership and better regulation of these potentially lethal weapons), and mental health may be as well, though the connection between that and mass shootings is debated.

The thing we so often miss is what I uncovered in trying to write about these tragedies: community. And while I do see people tweeting and writing about the heroics of those trying to save others, and about the lives of those involved, those narratives tend to be buried (or used for further ends). Particularly the day-to-day lives of those affected, before and after the event everyone is so focused on. Because those stories never end.

Are these stories ever connected, too. We all live in communities, surrounded by other people, and each of us has a propensity for good or bad, love or hate. And try as we might, we cannot legislate love. We cannot dictate how people interact with each other, lest we become dictators ourselves. Boundaries or guidelines may be suggested by laws or constitutional amendments (or under some other organizational name), but how each of us relates to those others in our community is what really decides the outcomes of our stories.

I know, I’m tired too. I’m weary of the sudden spike in my chest whenever I hear of another shooting, knowing that we’re undergoing yet another trauma so common that it has become difficult to register.

Even as we hear about them, though, think on how you relate to those in your community, be it locally, nationally, or internationally. As you argue your point of view (goodness knows we all have them), think long on how you are arguing for it, and the implications of arguing for it. Because the root, the very root of these tragedies is anger and lack of empathy, no matter how one arrives there.

If you’re going to pull the trigger and kill another human, let alone many other humans, you must see them not like you, but as a problem worthy of hating and eradicating. That the only solution is their removal, as quickly and dramatically as possible.

The first step in response for all of us then, no matter how foolish, no matter how rose-tinted glasses it might seem, is to love. To reach out. Anything else is a step back into the abyss.