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morbidology · 6 years

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At Least 17 Dead in Florida School Shooting

At least 17 people are dead after 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz, opened fire at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, a small town approximately an hour from Miami.

The attack began at 14:00 local time on Wednesday.

Cruz shot and killed three people outside the school before entering the building. Once inside, he pulled the fire alarm to lure students out of their classrooms and increase the number of casualties. As the students appeared, Cruz fired shot after shot as they attempted to flee from the carnage. He killed another 12 people in the school. Another two died later after being transported to a local hospital.

Some students and teachers fled the school while others barricaded themselves inside their classrooms. The school went into code red, signalling an active shooter. Some started to text their loved ones goodbye, fearing that they wouldn’t survive while others posted videos and photos on their social media accounts. In one extremely disturbing video, students can be seen hiding in their classroom as semi-automatic gunfire can be heard coming from outside their classroom.

Cruz, described as a loner by a former classmate, had previously been expelled from the school for disciplinary reasons. Broward County Public Schools Superintendent Robert Rucie didn’t provide specifics as to what those disciplinary reasons were. Former classmates said that they weren’t surprised to learn that it was Cruz behind the shooting as it wasn’t uncommon for him to be showing off his arsenal of guns on social media. “A lot of kids threw jokes around like that, saying that he’s the one to shoot up the school,” said Eddie Bonilla, a student at the school. Neighbours and friends said that Cruz would often shoot at chickens and talk about shooting other small animals for pleasure. “We have already begun to dissect his websites and things on social media that he was on and some of the things… are very, very disturbing,” Sheriff Israel said.

Profiles of the victims have begun to emerge today.

They include assistant football coach, Aaron Feis, who was fatally wounded as he shielded students from the gunfire. Heroic Feis was an assistant coach for the school’s football team and worked as a security guard. He jumped between the gunman and a student to push her through a door and into safety.

Student Jaime Guttenberg, 17, has also been named by her family as one of the victims. Her parsnts launched a desperate bid to find her after they were unable to contact her during the chaos. Her brother, Jesse, managed to escape from the school unharmed but they couldn’t find Jaime. They were later given the traumatic news that she was among the dead.

Chris Hixon, the school’s athletic director and wrestling coach, is the third victim to be named. He was described as the kind of person “who would give you the shirt off his back.” The 49-year-old married father was a military veteran who served in Iraq in 2007.

Authorities said that Cruz was armed with an AR-15 rifle that was purchased legally. “No laws were violated in the procurement on this weapon,” said Peter J. Forcelli, the special agent in charge for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Miami. He is believed to have concealed himself amongst the fleeing students. He was identified through the school security videos and swiftly apprehended in nearby Coral Springs. On Thursday morning, Cruz was charged with 17 counts of premeditated murder.

The shooting has become one of the ten deadliest mass shootings in modern U.S. history with three out of those ten occurring in just the last five months.

#Nikolas Cruz #Parkland #Florida #School Shooting #School Shooter #True Crime

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moonwalkertrance · 6 years

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Parkland Students on Life After a Shooting: 'I Am Not Actually Fine'

For the roughly 3,000 students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., the last month has been filled with heaviness and heartache, as well as a strong sense of solidarity and strength. Since 17 of their peers and faculty were murdered on Valentine’s Day, the students have struggled with how to move on from the trauma while also mourning their friends and fighting to end to gun violence—all while juggling the homework, tests and everyday anxieties that come with being a regular high school student.

To convey what this moment has been like, nine Parkland students agreed to keep diaries of their experience for TIME. In the entries below, which have been lightly edited for clarity and are paired with photographs taken by Parkland students, they share what it feels like to hide in a closet as a shooter prowls campus, to imagine your alarm clock are police sirens, and to help organize the National School Walkout on March 14 and the March for Our Lives protest in Washington, D.C. Almost all of the students say their lives have changed forever.

“Surviving is the easy part,” writes 14-year-old Caspen Becher, a freshman who is part of the Douglas JROTC program. “Learning to live again is the hard part.”

February 14

There are certain sounds you cannot mistake. I sprinted back up the stairs and locked eyes on my classroom. As I reached for the door handle, it wouldn’t budge. It’s protocol for teachers to lock their doors during a code red. I’m not sure how to describe my feeling in that moment. We ended up making our way to an outside hallway intersection. Someone told us to stay here—this was the safest place we could be in the moment. Being able to see from three directions brought a sense of comfort. It told us that we had other options if we were approached by the shooter. We waited. It was only around five minutes, but it felt like hours. — Jack Macleod, 16, junior

A day supposed to be full of love will forever have the opposite meaning for me. Fourth period. We hear a pop and kids start sprinting and screaming. I was in the auditorium, surrounded by people crying and calling their parents. We didn’t know what was going to happen. I was frantically texting all my friends to see if they were O.K. Not having them respond was the scariest, heart-wrenching feeling in the world. An hour and a half later, SWAT came in—weapons drawn and heads on a swivel. The fear I felt still didn’t go away. We were put in a line and told to keep our hands raised high and visible. We ran. I didn’t stop running until I was met with a wall of officers. The entire time, all I could think about was the other people around me. I didn’t cry until I saw my dad across the street. It was then that it hit me. Some of my friends were hurt. Some of my friends were still missing, and there was nothing I could do. I walked with my dad, bawling my eyes out, only saying one thing: “Why did this happen to them? They could be dead. Why?” — Alyson Sheehy, 18, senior

#Florida School Shooting #Stoneman Douglas Shooting #David Hogg #Emma Gonzalez #Republicans #Donald Trump #Politics #Marchforourlives

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thefabulousfulcrum · 6 years

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They Were Trained for This Moment

How the student activists of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High demonstrate the power of a comprehensive education.

via Slate

By DAHLIA LITHWICK

The students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School returned to class Wednesday morning two weeks and moral centuries after a tragic mass shooting ended the lives of 17 classmates and teachers. Sen. Marco Rubio marked their return by scolding them for being “infected” with “arrogance” and “boasting.” The Florida legislature marked their return by enacting a $67 million program to arm school staff, including teachers, over the objections of students and parents. Senate Republicans on Capitol Hill opted to welcome them back by ignoring their wishes on gun control, which might lead a cynic to believe that nothing has changed in America after yet another horrifying cycle of child murder and legislative apathy.

But that is incorrect. Consumers and businesses are stepping in where the government has cowered. Boycotts may not influence lawmakers, but they certainly seem to be changing the game in the business world. And the students of Parkland, Florida, unbothered by the games played by legislators and lobbyists, are still planning a massive march on Washington. These teens have—by most objective measures—used social media to change the conversation around guns and gun control in America.

Now it’s time for them to change the conversation around education in America, and not just as it relates to guns in the classroom. The effectiveness of these poised, articulate, well-informed, and seemingly preternaturally mature student leaders of Stoneman Douglas has been vaguely attributed to very specific personalities and talents. Indeed, their words and actions have been so staggeringly powerful, they ended up fueling laughable claims about crisis actors, coaching, and fat checks from George Soros. But there is a more fundamental lesson to be learned in the events of this tragedy: These kids aren’t freaks of nature. Their eloquence and poise also represent the absolute vindication of the extracurricular education they receive at Marjory Stoneman Douglas.

The students of Stoneman Douglas have been the beneficiaries of the kind of 1950s-style public education that has all but vanished in America.

Despite the gradual erosion of the arts and physical education in America’s public schools, the students of Stoneman Douglas have been the beneficiaries of the kind of 1950s-style public education that has all but vanished in America and that is being dismantled with great deliberation as funding for things like the arts, civics, and enrichment are zeroed out. In no small part because the school is more affluent than its counterparts across the country (fewer than 23 percent of its students received free or reduced-price lunches in 2015–16, compared to about 64 percent across Broward County Public Schools) these kids have managed to score the kind of extracurricular education we’ve been eviscerating for decades in the United States. These kids aren’t prodigiously gifted. They’ve just had the gift of the kind of education we no longer value.

Part of the reason the Stoneman Douglas students have become stars in recent weeks is in no small part due to the fact that they are in a school system that boasts, for example, of a “system-wide debate program that teaches extemporaneous speaking from an early age.” Every middle and high school in the district has a forensics and public-speaking program. Coincidentally, some of the students at Stoneman Douglas had been preparing for debates on the issue of gun control this year, which explains in part why they could speak to the issues from day one.

The student leaders of the #NeverAgain revolt were also, in large part, theater kids who had benefited from the school’s exceptional drama program. Coincidentally, some of these students had been preparing to perform Spring Awakening, a rock musical from 2006. As the New Yorker describes it in an essay about the rise of the drama kids, that musical tackles the question of “what happens when neglectful adults fail to make the world safe or comprehensible for teen-agers, and the onus that neglect puts on kids to beat their own path forward.” Weird.

The student leaders at Stoneman Douglas High School have also included, again, not by happenstance, young journalists, who’d worked at the school paper, the Eagle Eye, with the supervision of talented staff. One of the extraordinary components of the story was the revelation that David Hogg, student news director for the school’s broadcast journalism program, WMSD-TV, was interviewing his own classmates as they hid in a closet during the shooting, and that these young people had the wherewithal to record and write about the events as they unfolded. As Christy Ma, the paper’s staff editor, later explained, “We tried to have as many pictures as possible to display the raw emotion that was in the classroom. We were working really hard so that we could show the world what was going on and why we need change.”

Mary Beth Tinker actually visited the school in 2013 to talk to the students about her role in Tinker v. Des Moines, the seminal Supreme Court case around student speech and protest. As she described it to me, the school’s commitment to student speech and journalism had been long in evidence, even before these particular students were activated by this month’s horrific events. Any school committed to bringing in a student activist from the Vietnam era to talk about protest and freedom is a school more likely than not to be educating activists and passionate students.

To be sure, the story of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas students is a story about the benefits of being a relatively wealthy school district at a moment in which public education is being vivisected without remorse or mercy. But unless you’re drinking the strongest form of Kool-Aid, there is simply no way to construct a conspiracy theory around the fact that students who were being painstakingly taught about drama, media, free speech, political activism, and forensics became the epicenter of the school-violence crisis and handled it creditably. The more likely explanation is that extracurricular education—one that focuses on skills beyond standardized testing and rankings—creates passionate citizens who are spring-loaded for citizenship.

Perhaps instead of putting more money into putting more guns into our classrooms, we should think about putting more money into the programs that foster political engagement and skills. In Sen. Rubio’s parlance, Marjory Stoneman Douglas was fostering arrogance. To the rest of the world, it was building adults.

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morganbelarus · 6 years

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Jimmy Kimmel Delivers Emotional Plea to Trump on Guns: Children Are Being Murdered

As the only network host airing new shows this week, it was left to Jimmy Kimmel to give the official late-night response to the horrific mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. And he had a lot to say.

Four and half months after he broke down in tears discussing the massacre that left 58 people dead in his hometown of Las Vegas, Kimmel once again decided to forgo the jokes in his monologue Thursday night in favor of an impassioned plea to lawmakers to finally do something about Americas gun violence epidemic.

Kimmel voice started out shaky as he began to talk about the senseless shooting that caused the loss of 17 lives, most of whom were young students. He quickly moved to show a clip from President Donald Trumps speech about the massacre Thursday morning, during which the president deliberately chose not to mention guns.

The host wholeheartedly agreed with Trumps assertions that no child, no teacher should ever be in danger in an American school and that no parent should ever have to fear for their sons and daughters when they kiss them goodbye in the morning.

And heres what you do to fix that, Kimmel said. Tell your buddies in Congress, tell Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell and Marco Rubioall the family men who care so much about their communitiesthat what we need are laws, real laws that do everything possible to keep assault rifles out of the hands of people who are going to shoot our kids. Go on TV and tell them to do that.

youtube

Kimmel told Trump to force the allegedly Christian men and women who stuff their pockets with money from the NRA year after year after year to do something nownot later, now.

And dont you dare let anyone say its too soon to be talking about it, because you said it after Vegas, you said it after Sandy Hook, you say that after every one of these eight now fatal shootings weve had in this country this year, Kimmel said, breaking down in tears. Children are being murdered.

Kimmel accused the president of doing worse than nothing about the issue by rolling back Obama-era regulations designed to keep firearms from mentally ill people. I agree, this is a mental illness issue, he said. Because if you dont think we need to do something about it, youre obviously mentally ill.

If one illegal immigrant causes a car accident, weve got to build a wall to keep the rest of them out, Kimmel continued. Why are you looking for solutions to that problem but not this one?

In his speech, Trump said he wanted to ease Americans pain, but in order to do that, Kimmel told him he needs to do something about guns. Somewhere along the line, these guys forgot they work for us and not the NRA, he said. This time, were not going to allow you to bow your head in prayer for two weeks until you get an all-clear and you move on to the next thing.

Kimmel concluded by asking viewers to visit Everytown.org to find out how to contact their representatives about guns, just as he did in his successful campaign to preserve Obamacare. And if they dont listen, he said, vote them out of office.

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bountyofbeads · 5 years

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https://thehill.com/homenews/news/448866-harvard-rescinds-acceptance-to-parkland-survivor-kyle-kashuv-over-past-comments?amp&__twitter_impression=true

Harvard rescinds admission to Parkland survivor Kyle Kashuv after previous racial slurs resurface

Harvard did the right thing with their admissions decision, sending a clear message that racism is not tolerated.

A white kid calling black athletes "nigger jocks" may very well be a "youthful mistake," as conservatives are arguing on Twitter, but mistakes have consequences. This is 2019, not 1819. Harvard has every right to rescind that student's admission.

Some people out here who think police murdering a black 12 year old with a toy gun is justified suddenly get really into forgiveness and grace when a white teen loses his chance go to Harvard.

Harvard rescinds admission to Parkland survivor Kyle Kashuv over past comments

BY JESSICA CAMPISI | Published June 17, 2019 - 10:26 AM EDT | The Hill | Posted June 17, 2019 |

A survivor of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting said Monday that Harvard University has rescinded his acceptance after recently surfaced screenshots showed him using racial slurs a few months before the 2018 massacre in Parkland, Fla.

Kyle Kashuv, 18, who was admitted to Harvard earlier this year, wrote on Twitter that he had been made aware of "egregious and callous comments" he made when he was 16 years old.

Classmates had accused him of repeatedly using the N-word, according to The Washington Times and HuffPost.

Kashuv, a gun rights activist, later posted on Twitter explaining his previous remarks, saying "we were 16-year-olds making idiotic comments" and that he was "embarrassed by it," adding that "the comments I made are not indicative of who I am or who I've become in the years since."

"When your classmates, your teachers, and your neighbors are killed it transforms you as a human being," he wrote. "I can and will do better moving forward."

After widespread national coverage of the comments, as well as dozens of individuals calling on Harvard to rescind Kashuv's admission to the school, the university sent him a letter dated May 24 saying it "reserves the right to withdraw an offer of admission" and asked for a written explanation within 72 hours.

In his response to Harvard, Kashuv apologized "unequivocally" for his previous actions and said he'd reached out to the college's Office of Diversity Education and Support to "begin a dialogue that I hope will be the foundation of future growth."

In a letter dated June 3, Harvard notified Kashuv that it was rescinding his acceptance.

"As you know, the Committee takes seriously the qualities of maturity and moral character," Harvard wrote in the letter, which Kashuv posted to Twitter. "We are sorry about the circumstances that have led us to withdraw your admission, and we wish you success in your future academic endeavors and beyond."

Kashuv said he emailed William Fitzsimmons, Harvard's dean of admissions, asking for an in-person meeting to "make my case face to face and work towards any possible path of reconciliation." Fitzsimmons rejected the request, according to Kashuv.

In a written statement to The Hill, Harvard spokeswoman Rachael Dane said, "we do not comment publicly on the admissions status of individual applicants."

"Harvard deciding that someone can't grow, especially after a life-altering event like the shooting, is deeply concerning," Kashuv tweeted. "If any institution should understand growth, it's Harvard, which is looked to as the pinnacle of higher education despite its checkered past."

He added, "In the end, this isn't about me, it's about whether we live in a society in which forgiveness is possible or mistakes brand you as irredeemable, as Harvard has decided for me."

-- Updated at 10:50 a.m.

#u.s. news #politics #international news #Education #Harvard University #College Admissions #Racist #racisim #racism #White Supremacy #hate speech

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kacydeneen · 5 years

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After Parkland, Students Fight for Their Right to Life

After a teenaged gunman killed 17 students and adults in Parkland, Florida, Jai Patel helped to organize Jersey City, New Jersey's, March for Our Lives, the demonstrations against gun violence that burst out across the country last year, spurred by the survivors of the Valentine's Day shooting.

The 19-year-old Patel said that the children who lived through the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012 were too young to demand justice but that his generation was not. He became even more determined last month when he and his friends found themselves running from bullets after a fight broke out at a mall in Jersey City.

Parkland Victims Remembered One Year After MSD Shooting

"It was crazy," he said. "The first gunshot went off and you’re frozen solid to the ground. You're like, 'What am I supposed to do now?'"

He hid in a store bathroom, angry at how guns, whether used in gang-related shootings at malls or mass shootings in schools, offices, churches and synagogues, have traumatized him and his peers.

'There Will Never Be a Why': MSD Hero Remembered by Widow

"Your right to own a gun should not infringe on my right to live peacefully," said Patel, now a first-year student at Rutgers University and the founder of the Hudson County, New Jersey, chapter of Students Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, an offshoot of Moms Demand Action.

That point was central to a manifesto by the students from Parkland's Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, who wrote that giving civilians access to soldiers' weapons was a "gross misuse" of the Second Amendment that endangered their rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The Parkland shooter used an AR-15, a type of gun favored by many mass murderers.

'It's Hard to Process': MSD Student Who Narrowly Survived Shooting Speaks

"I think that it was genius on their part to frame it that way," said another student, Alanna Miller of Southlake, Texas, outside of Dallas, and a volunteer for Students Demand Action there.

Kris Brown, the president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, said that the students' decision to set their inalienable rights as spelled out in the Declaration of Independence against the Second Amendment was a key to shifting the debate. Last year, a record number of candidates sought her group's endorsement in the midterm elections -- it backed 70 in all -- and many Democrats in particular ran on strong gun violence prevention programs.

"The narrative that had been owned by the NRA for a long time is, 'Don’t do anything to infringe on my constitutional rights,' meaning the Second Amendment right to own a gun," Brown said. "What these kids are articulating is, 'Do something to protect my fundamental rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.' Those are fundamental rights too and I think that has sparked something that is very gut level, and very basic with kids, who frankly feel afraid."

Polls show that young people care more about the issue of gun violence than older Americans. An NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll in October found that 5 percent of all registered voters listed guns as the most important factor in deciding their vote in the midterm elections, but among 18- to 29-year-olds, that number rose to 13 percent.

Polling done by Tufts University's CIRCLE, or The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, around the midterm elections found that 56 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds said they supported the gun-violence prevention movement. Those who identified as supporters or members of the movement were both more likely to report voting -- 65 percent of supporters said that they had voted -- and being contacted by campaigns and candidates, said the center's director, Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg. More than half of young Americans paid attention to the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, and slightly less than half, 43 percent, said it affected whom they voted for, at least somewhat, she said.

Last year was a deadly one. Besides the Parkland shootings, 10 people died at Santa Fe High School in Sante Fe, Texas, five staff members at the Capital Gazette newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland, 11 people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh and another 12 at the Borderline Bar and Grill in Thousand Oaks, California.

A team of more than 200 student journalists assembled by The Trace, a nonprofit news organization that reports on gun violence, and working with the Miami Herald wrote stories about 1,200 young people 18 and younger who were killed since the Parkland shooting.

But the year also has been a pivotal one for gun legislation groups: the Brady Campaign; Everytown for Gun Safety, including Moms Demand Action; and the Giffords Gun Center to Prevent Gun Violence. Twenty-six states passed gun violence prevention legislation, according to the Giffords Law Center, including 14 states with Republican governors. Compared to that, seven states approved of new gun rights laws.

The newly-in-charge House Democrats have already introduced a bill expanding background checks, though it is unlikely to be considered in the Republican-controlled Senate despite strong support from the public. Some 90 percent of Americans back such a step, according to a number of polls, and nearly three quarters of National Rifle Association members.

Shannon Watts, the founder of Moms Demand Action, noted that only a handful of legislators can block laws from being passed, as the country saw after the Sandy Hook shooting. But the Parkland students sparked an invigorated debate about gun violence that is playing out on social media and in city halls and statehouses across the country.

"I don't think there's any going back," she said. "There's no going back to the days where gun safety is the third rail of American politics."

After Parkland, Moms Demand Action was ready to absorb the thousands of new volunteers who came forward, Watts said. The organization has more than 5 million supporters and chapters in every state, she said. Now when a gun bill is being debated in a place like Montana, for example, dozens of Moms Demand Action volunteers will show up.

"And that has really shifted the optics and the dynamics of this conversation," she said.

Miller, a senior at Carroll Senior High School in Southlake, had researched the country's gun lobby and gun violence prevention as part of her school's debate team but knew of no way she could get involved. That was especially true in a more gun friendly state like Texas, she thought, though she was later surprised by how many of her schoolmates participated in a walkout.

"Until Parkland," she said. "Parkland changed everything because the students weren't just asking for thoughts and prayers as we're used to hearing all the time, it wasn't them asking for time to mourn but it was them coming out so confidently, so eloquently and becoming public figures of something they didn't ever ask to represent. But they took on that role and responsibility."

She said she felt that as someone with knowledge on the topic and experience in public speaking, she also had a responsibility to be an advocate.

"I also was somebody who was born in 2000 and has grown up in a post-Columbine world, and in my school I've had lockdown drills since kindergarten and we've had scares in our district," Miller said.

When Students Demand Action was launched nationally, she joined.

"There was finally a place for where I fit into the movement," she said.

Maren Frye, an 18-year-old in Berkeley, California, was one of the founders of the first Students Demand Action groups after the Pulse nightclub shooting in 2016. When she talks about guns, she does it in terms of making the country safe for children, she said. Gun violence is the leading cause of death among black children and teenagers, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"I think one of the most important things that has helped galvanize this movement is framing it in terms of a public safety issue rather than a political issue," she said. "Because we know that the politics of common sense gun reform divides people."

"When we talk about students' lives and and students' right to be safe at school it shifts that discussion," she added.

Photo Credit: Getty Images This story uses functionality that may not work in our app. Click here to open the story in your web browser. After Parkland, Students Fight for Their Right to Life published first on Miami News

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newstfionline · 6 years

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What happens to children who survive school shootings in America?

By John Woodrow Cox and Steven Rich, Washington Post, March 21, 2018

Thirteen at Columbine. Twenty-six at Sandy Hook. Seventeen at Marjory Stoneman Douglas.

Over the past two decades, a handful of massacres that have come to define school shootings in this country are almost always remembered for the students and educators slain. Death tolls are repeated so often that the numbers and places become permanently linked.

What those figures fail to capture, though, is the collateral damage of this uniquely American crisis. Beginning with Columbine in 1999, more than 187,000 students attending at least 193 primary or secondary schools have experienced a shooting on campus during school hours, according to a year-long Washington Post analysis. This means that the number of children who have been shaken by gunfire in the places they go to learn exceeds the population of Eugene, Ore., or Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

Many are never the same.

School shootings remain extremely rare, representing a tiny fraction of the gun violence epidemic that, on average, leaves a child bleeding or dead every hour in the United States. While few of those incidents happen on campuses, the ones that do have spread fear across the country, changing the culture of education and how kids grow up.

Every day, threats send classrooms into lockdowns that can frighten students, even when they turn out to be false alarms. Thousands of schools conduct active-shooter drills in which kids as young as 4 hide in darkened closets and bathrooms from imaginary murderers.

“It’s no longer the default that going to school is going to make you feel safe,” said Bruce D. Perry, a psychiatrist and one of the country’s leading experts on childhood trauma. “Even kids who come from middle-class and upper-middle-class communities literally don’t feel safe in schools.”

Samantha Haviland understands the waves of fear created by the attacks as well as anyone.

At 16, she survived the carnage at Columbine High, a seminal moment in the evolution of modern school shootings. Now 35, she is the director of counseling for Denver’s public school system and has spent almost her entire professional life treating traumatized kids. Yet, she’s never fully escaped the effects of what happened to her on that morning in Littleton, Colo. The nightmares, always of being chased, lingered for years. Even now, the images of children walking out of schools with their hands up is too much for her to bear.

On Saturday, some of Haviland’s students, born in the years after Columbine, will participate in the Denver “March For Our Lives” to protest school gun violence. In Washington, students from Parkland, Fla.--still grieving the friends and classmates they lost last month--will lead a rally of as many as 500,000 people in the nation’s capital.

“They were born and raised in a society where mass shootings are a thing,” she said, recalling how much her community and schoolmates blamed themselves for the inexplicable attack by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. “These students are saying, ‘No, no--these things are happening because you all can’t figure it out.’ They’re angry, and I think that anger is appropriate. And I hope they don’t let us get away with it.”

In analyzing school shootings, The Post found an average of 10 school shootings per year since Columbine, with a low of five in 2002 and a high of 15 in 2014. Less than three months into 2018, there have been 11 shootings, already making this year among the worst on record.

At least 129 kids, educators, staff and family members have been killed in assaults during school hours, and another 255 have been injured.

Schools in at least 36 states and the District have experienced a shooting, according to The Post’s count. They happen in big cities and small towns, in affluent suburbs and rural communities. The precise circumstances in each incident differed, but what all of them had in common was the profound damage they left behind.

Javon Davies, a sixth-grader at a Birmingham middle school, came home and told his mom, Mariama, that he and his classmates had spent the day in lockdown.

Javon, who is 12, had heard about Parkland. He and a friend suspected that they, too, might die at their school, so each of the boys wrote a will.

“Mom,” the other sixth-grader wrote in print letters, “I want to give my friend Javon every thing that I own that includes the xbox and games and controllers and all that comes with it.”

In Javon’s instructions, he listed his PlayStation 4, his Xbox 360 and his dirt bike.

“I love you my whole Family you mean the most to me,” he wrote. “You gave me the clothes on my back, you fed me, and you were always by my side.”

On the morning of May 15, 2017, Gage Meche, then 7, walked into his first-grade class and hung up his blue Nike backpack, then turned around. On the floor in front of him was a gun. It had just fallen out of another boy’s bag, and when a girl Gage had known since they were toddlers picked it up, the pistol fired, discharging a .380 round that blew through his stomach, tearing into his intestines and nicking a vena cava vein, which carries blood to the heart.

The boy who’d brought the gun had found it at home, investigators say. His father, Michael Dugas, had given the weapon to his older son, who was 17. The teenager kept it in his room, loaded, unlocked and inside a bag that hung on the wall.

Soon after the shooting, Dugas was charged with two misdemeanors, eventually receiving six months in prison for his negligence.

Gage, meanwhile, endured four surgeries then had to learn to walk and eat again. Now 8, his 40-pound body hurts almost all the time, said his mother, Krista LeBleu.

The girl who accidentally shot him still struggles with guilt and post-traumatic stress. At a church camp last summer, a water-pistol fight broke out, and when she saw the plastic guns, the girl began to weep.

Gage has changed, too, his mother said. He had been so excited to flip the coin before a local football game a few months ago, but when the team rushed onto the field, someone fired a cannon. The boy’s knees buckled, and he collapsed to the grass, trembling as he curled into a ball. He still has nightmares, but he tells his parents they’re too scary to talk about. Gage is also more aggressive than before, sometimes erupting for no reason. Afterward, he can’t explain what happened.

“I don’t know why I’m so bad,” he says.

What remains for school shooting survivors? Grief, guilt and fear.

One day in 2008, Samantha Haviland sat on the floor of a school library’s back room, the lights off, the door locked. Crouched all around her were teenagers, pretending that someone with a gun was trying to murder them.

No one there knew that Haviland, then a counselor in her mid-20s, had been at Columbine nine years earlier. On that day, April 20, 1999, she had been in the cafeteria, selling chips and soda from a food cart to raise money for the golf team. Haviland, always an overachiever, had taken second place at a tournament the day before and felt so good about it that she’d worn a blue dress and high-heeled clogs to school. As hundreds of kids ate their lunches, she and three friends talked about prom, which they’d gone to the previous weekend.

Then two girls burst into the room. Someone had been shot, they screamed. Someone had a gun.

Haviland froze, but her friends grabbed her, and they fled into the back of an auditorium. Moments later, she heard four or five shots and an explosion. Everyone sprinted out as Haviland briefly paused to take off her shoes. Barefoot, she ran after them and into the hallway, and just as she reached one door, it closed in front of her. A teacher in another part of the building had pulled the fire alarm and, as she would later learn, it saved her life, because down that corridor, Harris and Klebold were slaughtering anyone they could find.

Afterward, as the shock and grief solidified her plan to become a counselor, Haviland didn’t get counseling herself. She didn’t deserve it, she thought, not when classmates had died or been maimed. Many others had suffered far more, Haviland decided. She would be okay.

But now there she was, a decade later, sitting in the darkness, practicing once again to escape what so many of her friends did not. Then she heard footsteps. Then, beneath the door, she saw the shadow of an administrator who was checking the locks. Then her chest began to throb, and her body began to quake and, suddenly, Haviland knew she wouldn’t be okay.

Researchers who study trauma still aren’t certain why people who experience it as children react in such different ways. For some, it doesn’t surface for years, making the effects harder to trace back to their origin. For others, the torment overwhelms them from the start and, in many cases, never lets go.

Karson Robinson was 6 when a teenager opened fire on the playground of his elementary school in Townville, S.C., on Sept. 28, 2016. Three days later, on his seventh birthday, he learned that his beloved friend, Jacob Hall, hadn’t survived the bullet that hit him. That’s when the guilt took hold. Karson had leaped a fence and run at the first sound of the gunfire.

Maybe, Karson thought, he could have saved Jacob, the smallest child in their class, if he hadn’t fled. At home, Karson began to explode in anger, breaking anything he could reach. Other times, he insisted that everyone hated him.

In October, before a doctor finally diagnosed the boy with PTSD, he had a party for his eighth birthday, and at the end, they released balloons into the sky for Jacob. Afterward, he walked off by himself. His mother followed, asking what was wrong.

“I should have waited for Jacob,” he told her.

Haviland thinks a lot about the thousands of children like Karson who, she contends, America has done so little to protect since Columbine. Many of Haviland’s former classmates have found success and happiness, but others have tried to ease their pain with drugs and alcohol. Some have considered killing themselves.

One high school friend sent Haviland a message online a few weeks ago, saying that, since the Las Vegas slaughter this past October, she’d been so stricken with anxiety she could barely leave her house.

A decade ago, after Haviland’s panic attack in the library, she finally got therapy and has come a long way since. She goes to movies and malls and political rallies. She has so often told her story--of hearing the shots, taking off her shoes, sprinting barefoot through the hallways--that telling it again doesn’t wreck her anymore.

She knows, though, that the trauma remains.

Three years ago, someone accidentally pressed a panic button in the school where she was working, signaling to police that a shooter was in the building. Haviland wasn’t there at the time, but she pulled up in her car just as the officers did. Then, in front of her, she saw students streaming outside, their hands in the air.

She began to sob.

#school shootings #school shooting survivors

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macartneyfamilyadventure · 6 years

Text

What I Can Do.

When we were teaching in Costa Rica, we had earthquake drills. The siren went off, and we quickly headed to an open area with no trees or building structures, clasping our hands over our heads for protection. After one of those drills, I debriefed with my students about the phenomenon of earthquakes and how this was new to me. I explained that I had grown up and taught in Michigan before moving to Costa Rica, and in Michigan we didn’t have earthquakes.

What did you have? They asked.

Well, we had fire drills and tornado drills… and we had snowstorms. But no earthquakes.

The tornado drills must have been so scary! They said.

I thought back. Yes, there was always a rush of adrenaline when the tornado siren sounded, but they were never really that scary. Even in the event of an actual tornado, it was mostly a matter of keeping kids quiet and calm as they sat on the floor of the [disgusting] boys’ bathroom for hours while waiting for the tornado warning to pass.

No, those were not the scary drills. But we did have scary drills.

What were they? My students asked.

Lockdown drills, I answered.

What’s a lockdown drill? They asked.

And then I had to explain. To a group of kids that, with the exception of my few native U.S. students, had never heard of a lockdown. Nor did they have any concept of what that could possibly mean.

Keep in mind that in Costa Rica we taught in classrooms without walls, windows, or doors. There was nothing to lock down, even if we wanted to. But beyond that, there was no reason to even think about that idea. Mass shootings do not happen there, at schools or elsewhere. Students come to class knowing they are safe, and they truly are. They do not have to practice what to do in the event that a dangerous, armed person enters the premises because it just doesn’t happen there.

Nor does it happen in most places of the world.

But it does happen in the U.S.

More and more and more.

For my Costa Rican students, the very idea of a lockdown was inconceivable. The very idea of someone coming onto school property armed and dangerous was so absurd that it was hard to even consider. Do they have mental illness there? Yes, of course. Do they have disgruntled people there? Sure. Bullying? Absolutely. But shooting students and teachers? NO.

Now we are back in the states. And this most recent school shooting has hit both Bruce and I even harder than the past shootings did. Perhaps it is because it occurred close to home – only a 2-hour drive from where we live now. Perhaps because it occurred in a high school very similar to the school in which my husband teaches. Perhaps because these horrible tragedies seem to be happening so often now, and the hatred and violence in this country seem to be escalating by the day.

We spent almost three years living and working in a country that prides itself on peace. Costa Rica is known as the “Switzerland of Latin America.” The work was hard and the resources were slim to none, but we could go to school every day knowing with certainty that the scariest intruder we might have in our classrooms would be of the arachnid or reptile variety. Students could learn deeply there because they felt safe. They did not have to worry about violence at school. They did not have to practice lockdown drills or active shooter drills as a part of their regular school day. Because they were not overly stressed or anxious, because we cultivated a culture of peace, open-mindedness, and acceptance, our students in Costa Rica could do what students are SUPPOSED to do at school – learn.

After the tragedy in Parkland, I wanted nothing more than to take my family away from all of this horror and run back to the safe haven of the jungle. But in reality we know that we cannot afford to do that, and we have begun to build a new life here in the states. And running away from problems does not solve the problems.

So, with the recent terrible tragedy weighing heavily on my heart, I find myself asking, What can I do? How can I, in some way, help to protect my own children, my students, and my colleagues from ever having to experience a horror like what happened in Parkland on February 14th?

I can start by joining the movement that the brave survivors of the Parkland massacre have begun. I applaud the students’ dedication to their cause and their perseverance to enact change. As a family, we plan to join the March for Our Lives on March 24th in southwest Florida, and to support the students’ plea for greater gun control and stronger background checks. My husband and I both believe that there is absolutely no reason for a civilian to own a military-style assault weapon. None.

Because it is too easy to kill large masses of people with one.

Because there is no other purpose for such a weapon other than killing.

Because Jesse Osborne, who killed his father and a first grader in September of 2016, lamented that he hadn’t murdered the 50-60 students and teachers he’d planned to kill, “The problem,” he explained, “was the weapon.” [From the Washington Post]: He’d only had access to the .40-caliber pistol his father kept in a dresser drawer. It had jammed on the playground, just 12 seconds after he first pulled the trigger. The weapon Jesse really wanted, the one he’d tried desperately to get, was, the teenager believed, locked in his father’s gun safe: the Ruger Mini-14, a semiautomatic rifle much like the gun that, 17 months later, was fired again and again at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, during one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history.

Because the lives of our children matter. Nothing matters more.

I can impact the lives of children. This may be the most powerful way in which I, and all educators, can be a positive change in the midst of the awful reality we are facing. As educators, we often spend more time with our students than their parents do. Let’s use that time wisely. Let’s focus on teaching our students the social and emotional skills they need to be successful, not just the academic skills. Let’s realize that we are not just educating our students’ brains, but also their hearts. Let’s teach our students to be open-minded, caring, and tolerant. Let’s teach them to be resilient when times are tough, rather than vindictive. Let’s teach them to understand and accept one another’s differences even when they don’t agree with them.

Let’s prepare them for life.

Not just for a standardized test.

Not just for the next grade level.

Not just for college.

But also for life.

Because if they do not have the skills and abilities they need to be able to interact with one another in peaceful, open-minded, and collaborative ways, what will become of them? The reality is that we live in a world where we are confronted daily with challenges to overcome, with certain disappointments, and with people who are different than us. We need to be able to successfully navigate the challenges of life, to handle disappointments and grow stronger because of them, and to positively interact with people of all backgrounds and beliefs.

We need to equip our students for the world of today. Their futures depend on it.

So what can I do? I can teach my students’ hearts in addition to their minds. I can prepare them for life in addition to preparing them for the next test. I can show them that, no matter what their home lives may be like, someone truly cares about them.

#enough

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