We are failing our children

As a parent, I’ve been reading about the demands being made by high school students with a mix of concern and guilt. Yes, guilt, because these students, many of whom aren’t even old enough to vote, have taken on an issue that the entire population of adults in this country has failed to resolve. I count myself among those adults.

I remember Columbine. My son was two, and my daughters were 8 and 12. The horror I felt upon learning about the shooting sticks in my mind clearly, even after all these years. And just as clearly, I recall the communal nature of that horror.

To this day I vividly remember conversations I had in the aftermath of the shooting. The shock and heaviness of it enveloped the usually chatty hours spent waiting out dance classes and soccer practices. How heartbroken, and puzzled we all were. I distinctly recall an evening shortly after the shooting when I had dinner with friends and we debated the role that bullying might have played in the shooting until we felt such intense sadness that someone finally changed the subject.

I’ve been thinking about those conversations a lot lately, and comparing them with the reactions I’ve run into after the most recent shooting in Florida that left 17 dead. That is, not much of a reaction at all.

Acquaintances I’ve encountered over the last few days haven’t mentioned it. Nor have most of my friends and co-workers. Those who have broached the subject have done so with a sense of powerlessness. We’re all sorry, but none of us can see an end to this sort of thing. All the dialogue that does come up feels trite.

When Columbine happened, a school shooting was a strange and horrific anomaly. Today, mass shootings in general have become increasingly common. And what bothers me the most about school shootings is no longer the questions that arise in their aftermath: the wondering whether bullying, or mental illness, or guns are to blame.

What bothers me is the fact that as adults we are failing our children. As a country, as a whole, we are failing to keep our kids safe. Our efforts to do so are not working. Schools have implemented so many security measures that, when my kids were in school, I used to marvel at how difficult it was to get past the lobby — even if just to deliver a forgotten lunch.

The trouble is, criminals find their way around those measures. Stronger security measures often seem to result in more insidious crimes: more powerful weapons and more sinister ways to infiltrate buildings.

In the most recent school shooting, the gunman walked into the school simply by looking like a student — which he had been prior to being expelled. And, disturbingly, he pulled the fire alarm in order to escape with the other students.

As a parent, I’m worried. I no longer have children in high school, but I do have a son in college. That’s the child who was two at the time of the Columbine shootings. So now he’s 20. You know what that means? He grew up hearing about school shootings. For him and all his peers, mass shootings aren’t an almost unheard of abnormality. They are regular occurrences.

I don’t think my son worries that such a thing could happen to him. But I worry. Beyond that, I worry that it will happen to somebody else. In fact, I am convinced that it will. No one knows where, no one knows when. Worst of all, we know that the school where it happens will have systems in place to prevent it, but the shooter will find a way around them.

Each time it happens, we fail all of our children. Because when, as a nation we fail to keep kids safe, all kids suffer. All are at risk.

The students in Florida have taken matters into their own hands last week. They have become vocal advocates of expanded background checks and gun control measures. Gun control is such political lightening rod that many of us believe it is impossible to touch without risking serious consequences.

But the students at Marjory Stoneman Douglass High School have buried 17 of their friends and classmates. They are no longer afraid of the consequences of gun control. They know that their very lives may depend upon it.