Sadly, Iowa shooting will be forgotten
April 20, 2024, will mark the 25th anniversary of the massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, where two student gunmen killed 12 other students, a teacher then themselves.
I was among reporters from all over the country, all over the world, who rushed to that shocked, grieving community in the days immediately after the mass shooting.
Such a horror was unimaginable. Then.
Now, Columbine isn’t even among the top 10 of mass shootings in America. It has fallen to No. 16.
Sixteen.
Mass shooting numbers are overwhelming
Last year, the Gun Violence Archive cataloged 656 mass shootings in the United States. Gun deaths – “willful, malicious (or) accidental” – numbered 18,854.
The Washington Post just updated its school shooting data base, noting that there have been 394 school shootings since Columbine.
The latest occurred on Thursday at Perry High School, outside of Des Moines, Iowa, where six people were shot by a 17-year-old student who then killed himself.
One of the victims, a sixth grader, died.
This will be the first mass shooting of 2024 that most of us forget.
You know I’m right.
Our standard national reaction to mass shootings has come to follow a well-worn script.
Politicians express sadness and shock, as if anyone is shocked anymore. They offer thoughts and prayers.
Well-meaning people come forward to say something must be done, to which the politicians in the pocket of the gun lobby say we must not act in haste.
They tell us we must give victims’ families and their community and ourselves time to mourn. To grieve. By which they mean time to … forget. And we do.
Forget.
A reason to not print the shooter’s name
Authorities in Iowa have released the name of the 17-year-old shooter. It’s in all the articles I’ve read about the incident, but I’m not going to print it.
I try not to name the killers in shootings like this after having had several conversations with an Arizona couple named Tom and Caren Teves.
Their son, Alex, was among 12 people killed (with 70 more wounded) at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, in 2012.
Alex Teves was 24 years old. Smart. Ambitious. Committed. He graduated from Desert Vista High School and the University of Arizona. He died trying to protect his girlfriend from gunfire.
Several years after the shooting, with the killer on trial, Alex’s parents issued a request to the news media reading in part, “We ask that you refer to the individual who opened fire in the theater on July 20th as ‘the shooter’ or ‘the defendant’ throughout your story, broadcast or social media posts.”
The fact that the shooter in that case was looking for publicity, and got it, added to the pain of victim families.
Tom Teves said at the time, “Stop showing cowards and start showing heroes, so that another father doesn’t feel the hole in his body that I have and I know will never go away.”
We’ve lost this part of sympathy
The Teveses are not the only victims of gun violence I’ve spoken with in the quarter-century since Columbine. And Tom is right. For them, the pain never goes away.
But it does for the rest of us, in a particularly awful way.
Mass shooting are not unimaginable anymore. They’re expected.
So it isn’t simply that the pain from such atrocities goes away for the rest of us. It’s more like we don’t feel it in the first place. Not anymore.
You know I’m right.