A traumatised survivor of the latest US school shooting last week in Nashville, Tennessee. Photo: USA TODAY
The little girl in the window haunts me. She is caught inside a nightmare, so common it is as night follows day. The girl is on a school bus. Her face is pressed against the window. It is contorted by grief and anguish, and terror.
She had been a student at the site of the latest gun massacre in the United States, yet another massacre of children in a school. A former student took her guns back to Covenant School in Nashville and murdered three adults and three children. Police shot her dead.
Childhood should be the joy of innocence, of kicking a ball, running and laughing with friends, being part of a world open to fantasy and imagination. The real world can and should wait for them. They will arrive soon enough. But this time should be theirs, a rainbow of fun.
As I was walking through the parks of my little town last Sunday morning, I heard on the breeze the shouts of children, calls of “To me, here, this way, over here”, light and high. They were playing footy, carefree and happy in the moment. The sun was beaming down, radiance was all around. It felt good.
And yet here was a girl who left home to go to school and returned from a massacre. My heart broke for her and her classmates. Once would be evil, but in America, school massacres happen often enough to be common. This is a sickness. The girl in the window should haunt America. But in a much larger, and grotesque nightmare, for the most part, it will not.
Because this is a haunting that is now so common in America that schools have drills and protocols on how to react if a shooter comes calling. To see children being led out from the site of a massacre in their classrooms, holding each other’s hands, goes against every benchmark of what childhood should be. Except in America. No other country on Earth has these massacres.
Between August 2021 and June 2022 there had been 193 shootings in school grounds, according to the group Everytown for Gun Safety. The year before, there had been 62.
There have been more massacres this year in the US than there have been days: 130 deaths of four people or more. Since the Nashville shootings at the end of March there have been 10 more mass shootings, according to the Gun Violence Archive, resulting in 12 deaths and 35 injured.
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The non-profit group The Sandy Hook Promise was set up after the massacre in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in which 20 children and six adults were shot dead.
Its statistics on its website are chilling.
1) Each day 12 children die from gun violence in America. Another 32 are shot and injured.
2) Guns are the leading cause of death among American children and teens. One out of 10 gun deaths are aged 19 or younger.
3) Firearm deaths occur at a rate more than five times that by drownings.
4) Since the Columbine massacre in 1999, more than 338,000 students in the US have experienced gun violence at school.
5) There were more school shootings in 2022 – no fewer than 46 – than in any year since Columbine. This mirrored America’s broader rise in gun violence as it emerged from the pandemic.
6) An estimated 4.6 million American children live in a home where at least one gun is kept loaded and unlocked.
These numbers should also be condemnatory to all right-minded people, but when it comes to guns, right-minded takes a heavy swerve into the ditch.
Guns are woven into the fabric of American life; they are woven into the commercial and the political. The right to life has nothing on the right to bear arms, enshrined in the Constitution. Such is this deadly lacing many states now allow law-abiding citizens to open carry a firearm. In Missouri, for example, you don’t even have to be an adult, and now they’re debating whether it’s OK to bear arms in churches.
Like presidents before him, except Donald Trump, Joe Biden has denounced the latest shooting. “It’s sick,’’ he said. “We have to do more to stop gun violence … we have to do more to protect our schools, so they aren’t turned into prisons … I call on Congress again to pass my assault weapons ban.”
Everyone, of course, has offered up their prayers and thoughts to the survivors and the families who have lost a child, shot apart from rounds of a semi-automatic. As they always do, and as they will in the future. Thoughts and prayers – as if death by massacre was merely a part of daily life. Which according to the stats, it is.
Childhood should not end this way. It should fade into the passing years as each boy and girl emerges into the light of becoming an adult.
I will go back to the park this weekend to listen to kids, laughing and relishing the joy of being young. I will drink in their youth, and think of those poor wee ones across the ocean whose lives were blasted into eternity by someone with a gun and a hatred and hollowness in their heart.
