Every time I put my daughter on the school bus, a fleeting — yet debilitating — thought crosses my mind: what if this is the last time I see her alive?
While I wish the notion was dramatic or paranoid, it’s not.
Far too many parents find themselves reliving what it was like to see their grinning child climb those stairs at the start of their day because that was, in fact, the last time they did see them alive.
As parents, what else are we supposed to think? Our ability to feign ignorance has long passed. We know children are murdered in their classrooms. It happens so much that there is a database called the K-12 School Shooting Database to keep track of every occurrence.
So here we are, experiencing another season of back-to-school shopping lists, new lunch boxes, crisp notebooks, and school shootings.
With 230 deliberately preplanned school shootings over the past 60 years in the United States, and 181 people shot on K-12 school property in 2024, the reality is that in America, somehow we have become accustomed to trading backpacks for caskets.
The story at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia is all too familiar. The alleged shooter was a quiet, male teenager with easy access to a firearm. Like clockwork, the media will attempt to fill in the gaps in this story over the next few weeks. What was his family life like? What was the state of his mental health? What was his motive? The human mind cannot help but attempt to make sense of it all. Maybe he was isolated, depressed or bullied. And while all these things are tragic on their own, there is one more thing a student needs to shoot his classmates: a gun.
The U.S. Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center found that 76% of the time, a gun used in a school shooting is from the home of the shooter or the home of a close relative. And in this case, as is the case in many deadly mass shootings, the gun he had access to was not just any gun — it was an assault weapon. This is the same weapon used in the most infamous mass shootings, which is not a coincidence, since the use of an assault weapon in a mass shooting results in 62% more fatalities.
It is hard to comprehend the destruction of an assault weapon. As if being notified your child has been gunned down at school isn’t earth-shattering enough, bodies mutilated by bullets meticulously created to inflict as much damage as possible are unidentifiable. Parents are ID’ing their children in unfathomable ways, being asked for hairbrushes to pull DNA samples, or showing photos of the only part of them to remain intact: their sneakers.
We will pay attention to this tragedy, at least for a few days, as it fits the “we can’t believe this could ever happen here” narrative. Meanwhile, there are children exposed to gun violence regularly all over this country. Plus, Apalachee’s mass shooting was actually the 10th in September alone; there have been a total of 385 mass shootings in this country so far this year. If you didn’t know that, it’s because a majority of these will never be deemed newsworthy.
This is not a well-regulated Militia; this is carnage. And preventable carnage, at that.
Here in Connecticut, we understand the importance of safe storage. After their son Ethan was killed by an unsecured gun at a friend’s house, parents Kristin and Mike Song fought tirelessly to ensure that gun owners have a responsibility to keep firearms away from children. This legislation, best known as “Ethan’s Law,” has made its way to Washington, D.C. Unfortunately, it has stalled due to so-called leaders pandering to the terror-inflicting gun lobby.
Safe storage isn’t all we need to prevent school shootings from happening — but it’s a start. And we need to start somewhere. Too many of us refuse to live in a country where the number one killer of our children is firearms to do nothing.
Because back-to-school shopping should include finding the perfect outfit to wear proudly on the first day of school, rather than finding the perfect outfit to be buried in.
Caitlin Clarkson Pereira is a mom, a professional firefighter, and the executive director of a nonprofit gun violence prevention organization. She lives in Fairfield.
