The nightmare of a school shooting close to home

It's too close, too close. What if it was my kid? A victim? Or I mean the shooter.

It is exactly 27.16 miles from my house to Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, as the crow flies. My kids were out of school today for a “professional development day,” when the faculty holds boring meetings. But today, I’m sure the faculty were as glued to their phones and televisions as I was at work. About 10 a.m., the story broke that Apalachee was in hard lockdown, and shots had been fired. The details emerged, at first fuzzy—ambulances and air ambulances transporting the wounded. Then the tally came in: four dead and nine injured.

Apalachee High School, image source: Google Earth

The shooter, or should I say officially—a suspect—is a 14-year-old boy named Colt Gray, according to Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith. The entire population of Barrow County is about the population of Alpharetta, in Fulton County, where I live. It’s a fairly rural place, but as most places within 50 miles of Atlanta, it’s growing fast, pulsing with the metro expansion.

We’re—I am—faced with the same question I always ask myself when these things occur. Why? How could a kid, who’s really no different than one of my own two boys, do such a thing? What if this happened at the high school where my oldest attends? How do the parents of young Colt feel—the thousand sleepless nights they face trying to figure out how they failed him? How do the bereaved, destroyed, parents of the two children who were killed, or the families of the two faculty, reconcile their own grief?

What can anyone even say to these people to stave off complete ruination of their minds and the crushing of their souls? I have no words. If it were me, no words could ever suffice. My mind cannot go there. It is a nightmare of the kind that haunts ten year olds who have watched a movie a bit too scary for their age. But this nightmare is too scary for anyone who is a parent living in what is supposed to be a first world country—the envy of the whole world.

I know there are parents in parts of the world where having kids killed, or become killers, is not so distant to the mind. I know, in Somalia, for instance, young teens fight in the civil war rendering that country to dust and starvation. I know, in Gaza, children are reared to shoot Israelis, and are handed toy AK-47s in preschool (where the rockets are fired from). But those are places far away, to be written about from a great distance and observed from a great height, like the entomologist observes ants.

But this shooting is here in Georgia. They say it’s the worst mass school shooting the state has ever had. I don’t care. Such horror has no measure. The Fulton County School District sent out a mass email encouraging us to “talk to your kids about violence.” There’s a link to the National Association of School Psychologists: “Talking to Children About Violence: Tips for Families and Educators.”

We are supposed to reassure children that they are safe, validate children’s feelings, make time to talk, and keep explanations developmentally appropriate. And seven other points and tips that could come right off a Powerpoint in a classroom safety meeting where even the presenter is bored.

I’ll confess something. For most of my life, I’ve been a Second Amendment supporter (meaning since I was 18 and bought a .22 target pistol). If I thought the government could keep my kids safe, I’d gladly give up ever owning a gun of any kind. If I thought no kid could ever get a pistol, or a rifle, or a machete, because the government loved my kids as much as I do, I’d trade my love of the constitution for that. I mean it. But it can’t happen. The government does not love my kids.

The school resource officer in Uvalde, Texas, didn’t love those kids more than his life. Any parent would have (some tried!) to run to the gunfire to save their child. I commend the law enforcement (I believe it was school resource officers) who apprehended young Colt before he could kill more people.

In our high schools, there’s funding for metal detectors, and I’m sure those will be deployed starting tomorrow. Some schools do not have such funding or fortune. In our schools, there’s a new and—from what I see—all-knowing system of cameras, electronic tokens, badges, sensors, and door closers that can lock a school down (“hard lockdown”) in a heartbeat. The system is tested at least once a year, and sometimes it’s accidentally activated. I get emails regarding “hard lockdowns” and that there was no actual situation.

My nightmare continues to be what the parents of kids at Apalachee High School are suffering right now. What if it’s a real situation? I can’t protect my kids, but I have to trust the government to do it. For two faculty and two students in Winder, the government failed.

The hot takes will blame the parents of the shooter. They’ll blame everyone who owns a gun. The politicians (Kamala Harris got a head start calling for magazine and “assault weapon” bans, universal background checks, yada yada).

Vice President Kamala Harris, speaking at a campaign rally in New Hampshire, called the Georgia school shooting “outrageous.” “Our kids are sitting in a classroom where they should be fulfilling their God-given potential, and some part of their big beautiful brain is concerned about a shooter busting through the door of their classroom,” she said. “It doesn't have to be this way.”

No. Most of our kids are not sitting there thinking about a shooter busting through the door. But they might be thinking about how their life is an endless target for bullying. Or how their home life is such a wreck that prison might seem an improvement. Or their anger and bitterness and disappointment at a variety of things is overwhelming to the point where that gun in the cabinet might be tempting.

In other words, the nightmare isn’t necessarily that stranger’s kid will be the one to break and do a terrible thing. Maybe it’s the kid down the street. Or the ones I’m raising and think I know how they are doing. Does any parent really know their kids’ inner life and heart? I grieve for the parents of the shooter, because what he did was “pure evil,” as Sheriff Smith said.

For a few days, our kids will be thinking about this event. The kids at Apalachee High School won’t stop thinking about it for a long time. They have to bury their classmates, and perhaps a favorite teacher. That’s the stuff of nightmares and PTSD. Evil has touched their lives, and hopefully grace is there to meet it.

I don’t know what I’d say to those kids. I hardly know what to say to mine. But I do know that whatever the school psychologists tell me to say is probably not true. Sure, statistically, my kids are fairly safe. We are in an affluent part of Georgia. There’s crime (there’s crime everywhere) but we have lots of systems to deal with it. But the government cannot keep my kids safe. I can’t tell them that because it’s a lie.

All I can tell my kids is to trust God, stay out of trouble, and to the extent possible, if they see someone acting what they think is crazy, tell an adult. I’d rather have my kid get the school into hard lockdown for no “situation” than to ignore something that might be important.

And I can tell them that guns are not cool. They are tools. Guns are lethal. I don’t want my kids growing up scared of guns, but I do want them respecting the lethality. Never take guns for granted. Ever.

None of that is helpful when kids are in a school that’s in “hard lockdown” and there’s actually a “situation.” The kids in Winder learned that. I don’t want my kids to have to learn it that way. It’s my nightmare.

It’s our nightmare. We should start treating it as one.

If your only solution is to confiscate every semiautomatic weapon in America, your imagination has failed you. If your only solution is to put up with the occasional mass shooting at a school, your soul is seared. At a minimum, let’s make all schools in America as safe as the ones my kids attend (which, again, are not perfect). Beyond that, I’m open to reasonable ideas.

And, yes, let’s pray for the kids and the families, and the faculty. There is a God in heaven, and He does answer.

At this point, I’ve run out of words. God bless you for reading.