A generation of kids who grew up haunted by the fear of school massacres can\u2019t outgrow their trauma: It\u2019s also stalking their carefree college days.
\nAmerica\u2019s latest mass shooting, until the inevitable next one, wrote a new community in the roll call of colleges stigmatized by tragedy. To Virginia Tech, Northern Illinois and the University of Virginia, add\u2002Michigan State University.
\nFootage showed students fleeing for their lives. Tales emerged of individuals smashing windows to save classmates from a gunman. Students blockaded themselves in dorms, built barricades in the library, cowered in restrooms, or just ran for their lives after their cellphones buzzed with a \u201cshots fired\u201d warning from the university police force.
\nMore horror, in yet another city, in the cycle of sudden death that can strike anyone, anywhere. With macabre irony, the shootings at Michigan State on Monday night, which killed three students and injured five more, took place on the eve of the fifth anniversary of the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on Valentine\u2019s Day 2018. Tuesday was also the 15th anniversary of a mass shooting that left five students dead at Northern Illinois University.
\nThe day brought the familiar futile anger over the tortured politics of gun control and splits among Americans about firearms that mean that \u2013 even after more senseless deaths \u2013 nothing will be done.
\nAny mass shooting is horrific. But whenever young lives are cut off before they\u2019ve barely begun, the tragedy is especially aching.
\nEveryone is \u2018terrified\u2019
\nParents who send their kids off to college fret about whether their sons or daughters will fit in, will struggle with academics, could stumble because of alcohol or drugs. Now, they must also worry about mass shootings. Can a nation that can\u2019t guarantee its kids are safe at school now not keep them safe at college?
\n\u201cThey are terrified, their parents are terrified,\u201d Michigan Democratic Rep. Elissa Slotkin told CNN on Tuesday after meeting survivors and family members from Michigan State, which is in her district. \u201cIt\u2019s terrorizing and we either do something about something that is terrorizing our population, or we don\u2019t care about it.\u201d
\nMichigan Attorney General Dana Nessel told CNN that when she dropped her kids off at Michigan State a year-and-a-half ago she thought, \u201cIt is going to be a miracle if we get these kids through four years of college without some sort of an incident like this taking place, because they happen so frequently.\u201d
\n\u201cAnd unfortunately, as it turned out, the answer is no,\u201d Nessel said. \u201cWe couldn\u2019t get our kids through college without subjecting them to a mass shooting at their school.\u201d
\nMercifully, most American students will and do make it through college without such a terrible experience. But that doesn\u2019t mean they will evade the fear such a shooting creates. Many know the panic stoked by false alerts about active shooters or a just the general question over whether their campus is safe.
\nMonday\u2019s killings led to a heartbreaking only-in-America moment, when a young Parkland survivor counseled stricken Michigan State Spartans on how to process their nightmare and what they would experience in the years ahead.
\n\u201cFive years ago, I almost lost my life in school. And yesterday more young people lost their lives to this issue of gun violence in college,\u201d Aalayah Eastmond told CNN\u2019s Victor Blackwell on Tuesday. \u201cI\u2019m so sad that so many other communities are dealing with this issue every single day.\u201d
\nA generation that came of age amid school violence
\nToday\u2019s college kids are no strangers to the pang of fear over gun violence.
\nStudies show school shootings are getting more frequent and exposing more kids to such horrors, and millions more to the nagging feeling that it could happen to them.
\nEach kid is now familiar with active shooter drills. Every parent knows the lurking anxiety that the worse could happen one day when they drop their child off at class. One of the only mercies of Covid-19 school shutdowns was that fear went away for a while.
\nA previous generation of students was marked by the Columbine High School shooting in Littleton, Colorado, in 1999 that killed 12 students and a teacher, and the Virginia Tech massacre in which 32 people died in 2007.
\nToday\u2019s college undergrads grew up under the shadow of the massacre of 20 6- and 7-year-olds and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, an outrage that shocked the nation but failed to unlock the stuck politics of gun reform. In a horrible and extreme example of how gun violence is a constant companion for today\u2019s young people, some Michigan State University students who survived Monday\u2019s mass shooting had also escaped with their lives from a November 30, 2021, shooting at Oxford High School, about an 80-mile drive east of the MSU campus in East Lansing.
\n\u201cI never expected in my lifetime to have to experience two school shootings,\u201d Andrea Ferguson, whose daughter is now at MSU, told CNN affiliate WDIV.
\nRemembrances of Monday\u2019s dead\u2002are beginning to emerge.
\nAlexandria Verner, one of three students who died, was remembered by her Clawson Public Schools Superintendent Billy Shellenbarger as \u201ceverything you\u2019d want your daughter or friend to be.\u201d The two other students killed were Arielle Anderson and Brian Fraser who both graduated in 2021 from high schools in Grosse Point, Michigan.
\n\u201cHow is it possible that this happened in the first place, an act of senseless violence that has no place in our society and in particular no place in school,\u201d asked Jon Dean, superintendent of Grosse Pointe Public Schools. \u201cIt touched our community not once, but twice.\u201d
\nEmpty Washington rituals
\nSuch is the inertia surrounding gun politics in Washington, that it\u2019s become a cliche in itself to write that the usual rituals of regret and condolences played out in the capital after a mass shooting but without any expectation that politicians would respond with meaningful measures to stop it happening again.
\nPresident Joe Biden and a bipartisan group of senators did pass the most significant gun safety law in decades last year, though it failed to ban any weapons and fell well short of what the White House, gun control advocates and most Americans want to see. Future gun control legislation is unthinkable with Republicans now holding a narrow House majority.
\nFirearms reform activists will hope that the Democratic sweep of the governorship and both chambers of the state legislature in Michigan will open the possibility of significant changes to the law \u2013 but gun politics remain treacherous for lawmakers in swing states who want to cling onto power.
\nBiden, speaking at a conference of county executives in Washington, issued one of his increasingly frequent condemnations of mass shootings, bemoaning \u201ca family\u2019s worst nightmare that\u2019s happening far too often in this country.\u201d
\n\u201cWe have to do something to stop gun violence ripping apart our communities,\u201d he said, and renewed his call for an assault weapon ban that everyone knows had no chance of passing even in a Democratic-run Congress.
\nArguments against gun control are as well rehearsed as those for it. Second Amendment absolutists often say the answer is more guns on the streets to allow people to defend themselves and to \u201charden\u201d institutions like schools and universities. Many point out that often, shootings are perpetrated by gunmen with troubled mental histories or who become isolated or alienated from their society.
\nBut there is rarely any concentrated effort from Republicans in Washington to spend the vast amounts of money needed to overhaul mental health services. In the states, Republican governors and legislatures are busily loosening already lax guns laws in a way that are likely to lead to even easier access to weapons.
\nGiven the paralysis of gun politics, maybe it\u2019s on individuals to act. Several recent cases of mass shootings have appeared to have a common factor: the disturbed mental state of an eventual perpetrator who had access to guns.
\nWhile police are still searching for a motive for the Michigan State gunman\u2019s rampage, his father, Michael McRae, said that after his mother died several years ago, he became \u201cmore and more bitter \u2026 angry and bitter \u2026 evil angry.\u201d The gunman\u2019s sister told CNN her brother was socially isolated and a criminal history with weapons. Police said he \u201chad a history of mental health issues.\u201d
\nDespite the deadlocked debates over guns rights and gun control, more pro-active action by loved ones and others might allow some red flag laws that could see weapons taken from the mentally ill to work. Katherine Schweit, a former FBI senior official and active shooter expert, said people who see relatives deteriorating mentally need to act.
\n\u201cWe have to follow through, we have to report stuff,\u201d she told CNN\u2019s Jake Tapper. \u201cIt\u2019s the \u2018see something, say something\u2019 that has prevented us having the terrorist events in the United States. We need to do the same thing for these types of situations.\u201d
\nThis could save lives in the future. But it\u2019s too late for three Michigan State students who will never graduate, or their fellow Spartans whose college years are now stained by the plague of gun violence.<\/p>\n
edition<\/p>\n
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