No Way

 The fifteen year old shooter...

The second teacher who made the 911 call...

The school full of stories...

The ones who won't be returning...

The ones left in mourning...

The community in shock...

It's a tired old story. We don't even bother any longer to make bold postures like "this will be the last." As a country we have come to expect school shootings as a fact of life. A fact of the end of life for those who did not survive the other three hundred twenty-two times it happened in the United States this year. 2024 ranks as the second highest for the total number of school shootings in a year. That is since 1966, when records on this manner of execution started being kept. As a matter of scale, in that year there were nine school shootings. In 2023 there were three hundred forty-nine. 

Contributing factors such as increased population and demographic changes figure in, but even though crime rates continue to decrease, gun ownership continues to rise. That would be a comforting thought if all those guns were actually protecting people, but it seems that some of them are still being used to kill people. 

In schools. This past Monday a fifteen year old shooter killed a teacher and another student before turning the gun on herself at the Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin. A second teacher made the 911 call that summoned police. "This has obviously rocked our school community," said Barbara Wiers, the director of elementary and school relations for Abundant Life Christian School. "But we know it affects not just our school community, but Madison and the greater area and all schools."

And so on. 

The satirical news outlet The Onion regularly posts the same story each time there is a school shooting. It starts with the headline: ‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens. 

No way.