Students are showing America what school shootings are like. Are you watching?
We owe it to the students at Oxford High School in Michigan to hear their screams and to watch their tears. We owe it to them to seek out their TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram videos, full of bullets and running and terror — to let ourselves fall into the fear and relief and overwhelming sadness they feel, and to watch it again and again until we are overwhelmed ourselves.
Because this generation is running out of ways to make us care.
It is sad. It is uncomfortable and it is overwhelming. You may want to look away. But if you are unaccustomed to seeing these videos, then I invite you to sit in that discomfort and terror for a moment. I assure you, your children are watching these videos, whether or not you have seen them. Their friends share them with whispers, and they watch them in the hallways at school, wondering where they would hide. They watch them late at night under the covers, feeling unsafe in their own beds. They live with this terror every day, and so should we. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the frequency of mass shootings at our schools. We cannot allow ourselves to shrug off yet another mass shooting.
This isn’t the first time students have filmed their experiences inside school shootings, but it is perhaps the first time that we have been able to watch children interact with an immediate threat — and what those children have to do to protect themselves. Mark Kluska, a 15-year-old Oxford High School freshman, had the presence of mind to turn on a camera while his classmates spoke to someone they thought was the shooter through their classroom door. It is not a stretch of the imagination to believe Kluska thought he was documenting his last moments on this earth.
Kluska continued to film as students maintained their calm, identified speech patterns in the voice on the other side of the door, and concluded that the person was a threat. They began to crush around a back window and fled for their lives, rushing across a snow-covered courtyard into the arms of actual law enforcement.
If we ignore these videos, then we turn a blind eye to the pain and confusion that we are forcing our children to endure in the name of the Second Amendment. If we ignore this, we tell Madisyn Baldwin, Tate Myre, Justin Shilling and Hana St. Juliana that their fear and their deaths are an acceptable price to pay for the right to own a gun.
Baldwin, who was 17 and a talented artist. Myre, 16, was a linebacker and tight end on the school’s football team. Shilling, who was a champion bowler, and St. Juliana — the youngest killed that day at just 14 — a freshman whose parents described her as “one of the happiest and most joyful kids.” Two more students are in critical condition and seven more are at the hospital, including a teacher.
If we ignore these videos, you ignore that 20 babies in Newtown, Conn. should be experiencing high school as juniors and seniors this year; the same age as many of those killed in Michigan last week. If we choose not to watch these videos, we choose to tell the children killed in Parkland, Fla.; in Stockton; in Santa Fe, N.M; Rancho Tehama, Calif.; Roseburg, Ore.; and Columbine, Colo. — and countless more communities — that their lives were an acceptable sacrifice on the high altar of American selfishness.
In this year alone, there were at least 144 incidents of gunfire on school grounds, resulting in 28 deaths and 86 injuries. In 2020, there were 96 incidents and 24 deaths. Taking our children out of school for a global pandemic seems to be the only way we’ve found to slow down how many of them die at school. We owe them more than our apathy.
If you haven’t seen Kluska’s video, then I suggest you watch it. Hold that horror close to your heart — because those parents can no longer hold their own children close to theirs.
Maybe then the adults in America will begin to understand that there are hundreds of schools across this nation, full of students, who have first-hand experience with diving under their desks, hiding behind lockers, crying themselves to sleep every night, and gathering up enormous courage simply to step back inside a classroom.
Change in this country seems to come at the end of a camera lens, not a gun. So watch the videos. Look at the pictures. Observe the vigils and the candles and the tears. Anything less is tacit allowance of murder.
This story was originally published December 6, 2021 at 11:20 AM.
