Maryland shooting ricochets to Parkland

Another day. Another state. Another school. Another shooting. Another jolt of news about 8:45 a.m. Tuesday, as regular as morning coffee, that reached the school still digesting its own shooting tragedy.

“We were reviewing for the AP test, and everyone’s phone began buzzing, and everyone said, ‘It’s happened again,’ ” Marjory Stoneman Douglas teacher Jeff Foster said.

Another morning in America.

“We stopped what we were doing and talked about it,” Foster said.

Another school no one heard about until it became everyone’s school.

It’s in Maryland this time. The Great Mills High School. It suffered a small shooting, as these shootings get categorized. There were two students shot — three, if you count the 17-year-old shooter who was killed in the hallway by the school resource officer.

But as Douglas shows,

the actual number touched by this latest shooting is 1,600 students. That’s how many kids attend Great Mills, how many highschool lives changed in some form, how many read the headlines of other shootings while never thinking they’d be a headline, too.

“Less than a WEEK ago Great Mills High School students walked out with us to protest gun violence...now they’re experiencing it for themselves. The state of our country is disgusting -- I’m so sorry, Great Mills,” Douglas student Jaclyn Corin wrote on Twitter.

The “Mass Shooting Generation,” they’ve labeled themselves, which makes you wish for the days when Millennial and Gen Y tags seemed moderately annoying. But look at what this generation sees. Look at the hallways they walk.

Great Mills became the 17th American school to have a shooting this year. Seventeen. In another, more innocent America, that was just some teenage magazine.

Now, it’s a number you can’t skip over, not just for the schools involved, but how it corresponds to the 17 students and teachers killed at Douglas. And the 17 also wounded.

“How many people need to be effected by gun violence before something is done?” Douglas student Lauren Hogg wrote Tuesday on Twitter.

That’s the question the Mass Shooting Generation kept asking again Tuesday. There’s no clear answer. It’s become harder to say who is more afraid of whom these days in America: students and their parents of guns or politicians of the National Rifle Association.

The #Never Again students flexed their movement’s muscle by getting Florida to raise age and waiting limits on gun purchases. They want assault weapons off the streets. Just Tuesday in Coral Gables, fearing lawsuits from bucking state law, commissioners backtracked on a ban of assault rifles like the one used in the Douglas shooting.

The Maryland shooting was with a handgun. That’s a different debate. And the fact the shooter was killed by a school resource officer, well, that broaches the idea of arming all teachers, possibly so they can’t just teach the Wild West but live it, too.

At Douglas, students and teachers heard of the Maryland school shooting minutes after receiving the latest fallout from their shooting. They were just informed of Monday’s trespassing arrest on school grounds of Zachary Cruz, the younger brother of school shooter Nikolas Cruz.

There also were helicopters flying over the school Tuesday morning as part of some security measure. This is the new normal, it seems. It’s why the lessons being taught at our schools aren’t just about reading and ’rithmetic.

After his AP class, Foster had a freshmen geography class. Many of those students were in the building where Cruz murdered the 17, and were just sorting out the story of Great Mills.

“I told them what happened, and they wanted to know if anyone was dead,” he said. “It was still in its infant stages of news.”

It wasn’t until lunch they learned the shooter was killed. One of the shot students was in critical condition, the other in stable condition. The nearly 1,600 other students who were safe received a modern lesson.

“The notion of it can’t happen here is no longer a notion,” said Sheriff Timothy Cameron of St. Mary’s (Md.) County on Tuesday at Great Mills High School.

Another day. Another shooting. Another school everyone knows about now for the worst of American reasons.