The trickle-down trauma of school shootings
The first thing I thought about when I saw the news of the latest school shooting, which left four teenagers dead in Michigan, was my younger kid. He is joyful and thoughtful, and he worries. This child was excited to go to middle school because: It has metal detectors!
In his beautiful mind, metal detectors = a promise that he won’t die if another child wants to pull out a semiautomatic weapon that his dad allegedly bought at a store nearby, maybe during a Black Friday gun sale.
How would I explain away this one, like I had tried before? How could I help him feel like his mother was doing her job — protecting him — when I knew I couldn’t, really?
Some might point out that it’s a very small population of kids who have been privy to the particular horror of school shootings. Well, sort of. This week, four (so far) children out of 7 million in this nation are dead, and a handful are grievously injured. But the ripples go far and wide. Our kids are traumatized. We parents are traumatized. People without kids are traumatized.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2021/12/03/school-shooting-trauma/
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