When mass shootings are part of our lives.
We have decided as a nation that kids' lives are worth less than a bump stock.
“Don’t freak out,” my daughter said. “I’m fine, and the car is fine.”
That’s a hell of a way to start a conversation late at night. As a father, even with those words said, my testosterone went up. When your kid says something like that, the next thing is that I expect that there is trouble beyond the immediate. I went into protection mode only for myself to feel useless in the end.
“What happened,” I asked. I sat up on the couch and didn’t notice at the time that my forearms started to tingle. It’s a sure sign that my anxiety levels are spiking.
“We were sitting underneath the tree and we thought we heard gunshots so everyone ran.”
Fuck.
Our small suburban town has a carnival every summer, just like a lot of other towns. Downtown Days brings those rickety rides, funnel cake, and a ton of people. Like most of our town’s teenagers, my daughter and her friends went and stuffed themselves on fried food and overpriced lemonade. As they sat underneath the tree in our town square, the one that turns into the Christmas tree every December, they heard what they thought were gunshots.
Immediately, the crowd turned and ran. My daughter tripped, dropped her lemonade, band quickly got back up. Her friend also fell and lost her cell phone. Her group stayed mostly together and ended up hiding behind a train caboose that serves as part of our town’s history museum.
As my daughter told me this story, her adrenaline was still up. Her hands were almost vibrating and she kept focusing on how she dropped her drink and just lost out on 8 bucks. This may seem out of place until you’ve met people (or are one of them) who have made it through something scary. You focus on the small things so the rest doesn’t hit you too fast.
Luckily, there was no gun or mass shooting. But it sounded like it was because someone threw a bunch of firecrackers nearby as a prank. That bullshit “prank” sent a hundred teenagers running for the protection of a hundred-year-old train car.
This is the world that parents now live in.
There have been so many mass shootings that we can no longer remember the names of all of them. Spreadsheets are used to keep track and we’ve had to come up with “qualifications” of what constitutes a mass shooting. And before I get hit with “it’s overblown and it never really happens” let me give you a very polite, but firm, fuck you.
I live in Kansas City where during the Superbowl Celebration Parade when 33 people were wounded and one killed, a local DJ. Of those injured, 11 were children. So please don’t come at me with the bullshit that mass shootings are rare and happen “elsewhere.” They happen right here in our backyards.
That incident is what was in my daughter’s mind when she heard the firecrackers. She had to hope that she could run fast enough to get away. And as a father, I am fucking powerless to do anything to stop this. It’s a national failure that has somehow been wrapped up in politics. We find ourselves governed by conspiracy theories and live in world where a bump stock gets more attention than our children.
Again, fuck.
Our nation will continue to do nothing to curb gun violence and the mass shootings that follow. Instead, we are given bullshit statistics and empty promises. Let’s put more effort and money into mental health resources for our teens! What a load of shit.
Mental health treatment has not gotten better for our children. In fact, it has gotten worse. According to BoyMom author Ruth Whippman, mental health resources have decreased in schools over the years. Not to mention the strain put on the mental health system as a result of Covid. Our kids are in a mental health crisis and again, I feel powerless to do anything to stop any of this.
I sit on my couch listening to my daughter’s story about her lost lemonade and the firecrackers that sounded like gun shots. Jesus fucking Christ.
And the hits keep on coming. My other children were on the couch with me. My 16-year-old and my 11-year-old both told me that they have “escape plans” if an active shooter comes to their school. What the hell?
Both have been through two full lockdowns. One was an alarm that went haywire, and another was when a drunk dude jumped the school fence and ran onto the playground. For my teen, he doesn’t want to hide behind his school desk because he realized that his head was framed in the slates of the chair.
For my 11-year-old, he has plans to pop the mesh screen off his window’s classroom and make a run for it.
The way that both my kids talked about it, so nonchalantly and matter of fact, digs at my anger even more. My fucking kids have escape plans and have talked about it so much that they are now commonplace.
And as a father, I feel powerless to do anything. My one fucking job is to protect my kids, and I can’t. These shootings happen anywhere and everywhere. The common-sense solution would be real gun reform, more mental health resources, and at the very least that this is a huge problem.
But that’s not what we get. Instead, we see police officers on TV refusing to confront a shooter in Uvalde, teachers who heroically use themselves as human shields, and a governmental policy that pretends everything is fine. Yup, everything is just fine when an 11-year-old kid thinks his best chance is to outrun a bullet.
“Don’t freak out,” my daughter said.
That’s the problem. We should all be freaking out.