A generation of children who grew up terrified of school shootings is still tormented by their trauma, which is also stalking their carefree college days.
Until the inevitable next mass shooting in America, a new community has been added to the list of colleges tainted by tragedy. Michigan State University joins Virginia Tech, Northern Illinois, and the University of Virginia.
Students were seen fleeing for their life in footage. People were seen smashing windows to save classmates from a gunman. After their cellphones buzzed with a “shots fired” notification from the campus police force, students barricaded themselves in their dorms, created barricades in the library, cowered in lavatories, or just bolted for their lives.
More misery in another place, in the never-ending cycle of untimely death that can strike anybody, anywhere. The shootings at Michigan State on Monday night, which killed three students and injured five more, occurred on the eve of the fifth anniversary of the Valentine’s Day massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on February 14, 2018. Tuesday also marked the 15th anniversary of a mass shooting at Northern Illinois University that killed five students.
The day brought the usual fruitless outrage about the tortuous politics of gun control, as well as divisions among Americans concerning firearms, implying that, even after more terrible murders, nothing will be done.
Any mass shooting is heinous. But when young lives are cut short before they’ve even begun, the tragedy is extremely heartbreaking.
Everyone is frightened.
Parents who send their children to college worry about whether their children will fit in, suffer academically, or fall victim to drink or drugs. They must now be concerned about mass shootings. Can a country that can’t ensure its children’s safety in school now keep them safe in college?
“They are afraid, and their parents are terrified,” Michigan Democratic Rep. Elissa Slotkin told AWN on Tuesday after visiting with survivors and family members from Michigan State University, which is located in her district. “It’s terrifying, and either we do something about something that’s terrifying our population, or we don’t care.”
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel told AWN that when she put her kids off at Michigan State a year and a half ago, she thought, “It will be a miracle if we get these students through four years of college without some sort of event like this occurring, since they happen so frequently.”
“Unfortunately, the answer turned out to be no,” Nessel stated. “We couldn’t get our kids through college without subjecting them to a school shooting.”
Fortunately, most American students will and do complete college without such a traumatic experience. But it doesn’t mean they’ll be immune to the fear that such a shooting instills. Many people have experienced the anxiety caused by erroneous alerts about active shooters or simply wondering if their campus is safe.
Following Monday’s shootings, a young Parkland survivor counselled wounded Michigan State Spartans on how to absorb their horror and what they would face in the years ahead, in a sad only-in-America moment.
“I nearly died in school five years ago. And yesterday, more young people were killed in college by gun violence,” Aalayah Eastmond told AWN’s Victor Blackwell on Tuesday. “It saddens me that so many other communities are dealing with this issue on a daily basis.”
A generation that grew up in the midst of school violence
College students nowadays are no strangers to the terror of gun violence.
According to studies, school shootings are becoming more common, exposing more children to such tragedies and millions more to the nagging fear that it could happen to them.
Active shooter training are now second nature to each child. Every parent is aware of the nagging fear that the worst could happen one day when they send their child off at school. One of the few benefits of the Covid-19 school shutdowns was that the dread subsided for a period.
The Columbine High School shooting in Littleton, Colorado, in 1999, which murdered 12 students and a teacher, and the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007, which killed 32 people, defined a preceding generation of pupils.
Today’s college students grew up in the shadow of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, which shook the nation but failed to break the deadlock on gun regulation. Some Michigan State University students who survived Monday’s mass shooting also survived a November 30, 2021, shooting at Oxford High School, about an 80-mile drive east of the MSU campus in East Lansing, in a horrible and extreme example of how gun violence is a constant companion for today’s young people.
“I never anticipated to have to suffer two school shootings in my lifetime,” Andrea Ferguson, whose daughter attends MSU, told AWN affiliate WDIV.
Monday’s deceased are starting to be remembered.
Clawson Public Schools Superintendent Billy Shellenbarger described Alexandria Verner, one of three girls killed, as “everything you’d want your daughter or friend to be.” Arielle Anderson and Brian Fraser, both of whom graduated from high schools in Grosse Point, Michigan in 2021, were also killed.
“How could this have happened in the first place, an act of mindless violence that has no place in our society, and especially no place in school?” stated Jon Dean, superintendent of Grosse Pointe Public Schools. “It had an impact on our community not once, but twice.”
