School shooting heartbreak belongs to all

With moments of silence, candlelight vigils, and prayer, every community acknowledges the well of grief in Uvalde, Texas, the latest name in a national litany of shooting massacre sites.

Robb Elementary School joined Columbine, Sandy Hook, Marjory Stoneman Douglas and 10 other schools whose names are etched in our hearts with the losses that devastated communities. Mass shootings have occurred at concerts, in malls, supermarkets, movie theaters and workplaces, but it is in schools where the pain is felt most keenly in the losses of children whose futures had not yet begun to unfold.

From the Columbine attack in Colorado on April 20, 1999, to Robb last Tuesday, 169 children and teens have been killed in mass shootings in schools. The list of schools where shootings have resulted in the deaths of four or more people include the small West Nickel Mines Amish School in Lancaster County and rural Red Lake High School in Minnesota.

It includes college campuses at Virginia Tech, University of California Santa Barbara and Northern Illinois. Robb Elementary was the second deadliest elementary or high school shooting after Sandy Hook Elementary School, where 20 first graders and six adult educators were killed Dec. 14, 2012, by a 19-year-old man in Newtown, Conn.

In all these communities — none of them well-known in any way — life was normal until a mass shooter scarred them forever. In every other community in the U.S., life goes on as normal as we set aside the outrage and pain felt at a distance.

But the distance between where we live and where evil has shown its face may not be that far or wide. Just a week before the Robb Elementary massacre, 13 people were shot, 10 of them fatally, by an 18-year-old white supremacist who targeted Blacks in a community grocery store in Buffalo, N.Y., in the neighborhood where a Pottstown woman was visiting her mother.

At a prayer service in Pottstown last week, Whittina Gregory told her story: She was visiting her mother, who had suffered a stroke and lived near the Tops Friendly Market. The day before the May 14 shooting, Gregory and her niece were in that same store to return bottles. (New York has a 5-cent deposit on bottles.)

“I told my niece when I get home from the hospital Saturday, ‘I will take you to the supermarket again and we will return more bottles,’ but the strangest feeling came over me when I left the hospital, and I got very, very tired,” Gregory told the gathering at Bethel Community Church of Pottstown.

“I decided to listen to my body, and I laid down for 20 minutes,” Gregory said. “I thank God for that tiredness because if I had not laid down, my niece and myself would be two more victims. We would have been standing right there at the entrance when he started firing.”

Gregory recalled that she and her niece were evidently in the store a day earlier at the same time the shooter was getting his bearings for the next day’s horror.

Like Gregory, any one of us or our family or friends could be in a store, walking on a crowded street, at church, in a classroom, enjoying a movie or at work, when the next unstable gunman commits a horrific crime.

We can mourn with those who have lost loved ones.

We can bear witness and share the stories of victims.

And, we can appeal to the leaders in our towns, state capitals and Congress to pass and enforce laws that curb gun violence.

But these horrors will remain as near as Whittina Gregory’s close brush. The grief belongs to all of us, and thus so does the responsibility to provide supports for people struggling with mental illness and controls for those seeking weapons in their distorted missions.

Yes, we are enduring another heartbreaking tragedy. Just as heartbreaking will be our failure as a nation if we once again do nothing.

The cries to take action must not stop when life returns to normal. For many in communities just like ours, normal no longer exists.