Response to My Sixteen-Year-Old Self's Op-Ed about Columbine Published in the Local Newspaper in 1999

When America thinks of its worst murderers, names like Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, and the Boston Strangler come to mind. I’m sure no one thought that in 20 years, when criminal science majors study homicide cases of the late 20th century, they would be studying teen-age killers.

Twenty-four years later, when my husband reads these words in the clipping my mother sent upon request, he notes my apparent training. “Well, first I can tell you actually read the newspaper,” he says, a former reporter himself. “You understood your audience.” Meaning the white, middle-aged, mostly male editors of the Press-and-Sun Bulletin, my hometown newspaper founded in 1904, twenty-five years before my grandfather was born. 

My grandfather, Lawrence W. Loveland, DDS, graduate of the University of Pennsylvania School of Dental Medicine, was a man of many interests in addition to his private practice. Carpentry. Beagles. Hunting. My grandfather’s side business, the Highland Gun Shop, supplied and repaired small arms—mostly hunting rifles and handguns. In the shop hung a sign: “We Are Grateful for the 2nd Amendment: The Right that Guarantees All the Others.” 

Larry used to write letters to the editor of the newspaper, even sparking a decades-long written rivalry with one of its liberal columnists. The two men publicly tussled about everything from school budgets to election reform to teenagers’ use of the word like. A few years ago, deep into a genealogical bender, I conducted a Newspapers.com search of Larry’s name and came up with over 1000 hits. 

Most of Larry’s five grandchildren have honored his life, consciously or subconsciously, by embodying different parts of his legacy. One of my cousins helped take over the gun shop after Larry’s death in 2008. Another is studying to go to medical school. I, the eldest, became a writer. 

I am a junior at Union-Endicott High School. I am 16, just one year younger than the gunmen of Littleton, Colorado, one year older than the youngest victim. 

By the end of the week, almost every school district in the county had received copycat threats that sent us home early, or to wait out the bomb-sniffing dogs in the parking lot of the Boys and Girls Club. When we did go to school, some of us speculated on likely shooters—Goths with eyes lined in black, bullied brainiacs, kids who came to school ripe-smelling from neglect at home. Trenchcoats, like those worn by Eric Harris (18) and Dylan Klebold (17), were confiscated and searched by school officials across the nation.

I stopped eating lunch in our spacious, two-floored library (the library was where many of the Columbine victims were shot), but deep down I believed a shooting at my own school was unlikely. School shootings had not yet become prevalent enough to make them feel like the Unabomber’s packages that could blow up anywhere, anytime, or later, helplessly scrolling across the bottom of a 24-hour news screen. This was years before the country found its predictable pattern: Politicians tweeting thoughts and prayers, then arguments about gun control, and then, always, acceptance of itself as a nation where, by May, fourteen school shootings have already occurred in the year 2023. My friends and I never imagined violence that felt so exceptional would become so typical. We still believed in the power of outcry and that is why I wrote to the paper.

But in 2023, I scan my nine-year-old daughter’s clothes each morning, committing them to memory in case only shreds of leopard print leggings or a blue T-shirt printed with the words “Kind is cool” are left. I tell her I love her until the front door shuts or she disappears into the mouth of the school bus. 

I felt as if I knew the victims. I recognized the same enthusiasm for life in their eyes that I often see in my friends’ faces. I related to all of their dreams, their plans for the future. In a way, I feel almost guilty that I will be able to try and live out my dreams, but they will never have the chance. Or will I? 

I would. But I would discover other barriers to living out one’s dreams besides death by firearm. At sixteen, I had not yet learned the word “privilege” as a noun, something one possesses to a greater or lesser extent than others. I was still a year away from the disappointment of getting into my first-choice college whose tuition my parents could not afford. I still lived in the 1990s where everyone was equal so long as they worked hard and tried their best, where we had “multicultural week” at school to celebrate our “diverse” community—Italian American, Polish American, Irish American, so many shades of white. I still believed I had the same chances as my male classmates, my straight classmates, my classmates whose parents drove slick Mercedes into the church parking lot. I still believed the small number of my Black classmates, my even-poorer-than-living-in-a-duplex classmates, had the same opportunities as me. 

But I would make it to adulthood. I would take out loans and apply for grants and scholarships to attend college. I would go to graduate school for free. I would meet a man there, marry him, and have a daughter with him. I would become a college professor myself. I would write and publish some of that writing. These are accomplishments my grandfather would have valued. The kind he would have bragged about at the bar during his lunch hour. The kind that hide other failures. 

But after age thirty-one, I would no longer scan the faces of shooting victims looking for pieces of myself. I would scan them looking for pieces of my daughter. I would force myself, or feel utterly compelled, to imagine her 50-pound body so torn apart by bullets that someone wearing latex gloves must swab my cheek to confirm she is mine. 

Our principal asked us to take a moment to think about what happened in Colorado, to pray for the students whose lives were taken from them by their own peers. My homeroom went silent, each person’s face clouded by sadness, anger, and fear. 

Some years before I was born, at the lake cottage where my family gathered in the summer, my grandfather—on his first martini or his third—was cleaning one of his guns inside the cottage. No one in my family witnessed exactly what happened, but the gun discharged accidentally. A bullet shot up through a (thankfully unoccupied) second-floor bedroom. 

But at first, all my youngest aunt heard was a shot. According to my mother, my aunt ran into the backyard, screaming, “He finally killed Mom! He finally killed Mom!” She meant my grandmother.

There was violence in my grandparents’ home, you see. 

The moment of silence lasted about 30 seconds, and then it was over. And while everyone seemed to be aware of the murders for the rest of the day, it wasn’t talked about much. My teachers did not mention it in class. Our superintendent did not come to speak with the student body about it. The only conversation I heard concerning it was among my classmates. 

My daughter has a social-emotional curriculum at her elementary school. It involves activities like open circle. Kids anonymously slip questions into a box, and then the teacher reads them and facilitates a conversation about belonging, or confidence, or friendship. My daughter, sensitive and intense, a honey-haired rule-follower, once wrote about her best friend playing with other girls at recess and not including her. 

But sometimes open circle focuses on current events. The uptick in violence against Asian Americans during the pandemic. The war in Ukraine. Adults keep fewer things from children these days. My daughter gets angry when she learns about a grave event at school first. 

So, when an eighteen-year-old shooter killed nineteen elementary school children and two teachers in their classrooms in Uvalde, Texas last year, my husband and I got out in front of things. At dinner, we told our daughter together so she didn’t hear it first the next morning in class. 

“Why would anyone want to hurt kids?” she said. 

We said we didn’t know. 

“What about their families?” 

We said we don’t know about them, either, except the pain we could imagine. We did not tell her what I once read about the parents of the Sandy Hook victims. In the hours after Adam Lanza (20) massacred twenty first-graders in their classrooms in 2012, the surviving students reunited with their parents at the local fire station. When no more children were left to claim—when only adults remained and looked at one other and finally understood—it was reported their screams could be heard from the street.

Instead, we reminded our daughter about her school’s safety. Its locked doors and security officers. Its teachers who are trained how to barricade their classroom doors. The drills she practices where she crawls underneath her desk, covers her head, and doesn’t speak. I remembered that her earliest teachers—kindergarten, first grade—told her the drills were in case a robber or wild animal came into the school. Now, she knew the real reason. 

I remembered that when she came home after her first active shooter drill, she reported the teacher praising her silence. “I was so quiet, Mama!” she said. Five years old. I think about this now that she’s nine and can’t stop talking during movies so that we’re always pausing them, turning Inside Out and Encanto into four-hour events where our legs go numb from sitting. 

Now, at nine, she’ll tell you exactly where and how she would hide. In Uvalde, one child hid under a table that had a cloth draped over it. Another covered herself in her friend’s blood so as to look dead, too. 

My daughter’s plan: To fold her smaller-than-average body into her cubby and hide beneath her coat. Her words and the pride with which she speaks them—clever girl—rip another invisible hole through me. 

I was tall at her age. I wouldn’t have fit into the cubby. My daughter has always been smaller than other kids her age, a source of insecurity for her. I don’t tell her why I feel grateful for her size. 

Do they think this area is immune to that kind of violence?

In 2009, when I lived with my husband in rural Alabama, a mass shooting occurred in my hometown. Jiverly Antares Wong (41) entered the Binghamton American Civic Association with a 9 mm Beretta and a .45 caliber Beretta—both semi-automatic pistols, Italian-made, like me. Wong killed thirteen people—nearly all of them immigrants like himself seeking American citizenship. Authorities reported that Wong had become disillusioned with the U.S. It was the 13th most deadly mass shooting in the country’s history. 

My mother was visiting us at the time. My grandfather had been dead a year, and my uncle and cousin were running the gun shop, selling off a fair amount of inventory while they decided whether to keep the business going.

The first words my mother said when we learned of the shooting at the civic center were, “I hope those weren’t our guns.”

How many more young lives will we have to lose before our society wakes up? 

According to Everytown for Gun Safety, an advocacy group founded after the Sandy Hook massacre, 1,121 people were killed in mass shootings in the United States between 2009-2018. 836 more were wounded. I wonder when the data will catch up to the current year. 

From Columbine on, The Washington Post began tracking school shootings specifically, updating their count after each one. By 2022, 311,000 children were exposed to gun violence at school. 186 children, staff, and others were killed in school shootings. 

Most children who find themselves in trouble for even small crimes do it for attention. The heart of the matter is not what the child did, but why he or she did it and what we can do to keep it from happening again, or worse, from evolving into something more dangerous. Perhaps this kind of prodding may be stepping on parents’ toes, but what if getting help to their child would prevent a hideous crime?

When I wrote this op-ed in 1999, I did not yet know the story of when my uncle, then a teen, took one of my grandfather’s guns and shot it out of my mother’s bedroom window into the next door neighbor’s house. Thankfully, no one was injured. Because my mother was away at college at the time, we don’t know why my uncle shot the gun, nor how my grandfather, who beat his children with a belt when they misbehaved, reacted to his son stealing one of his guns. He was long dead by the time I heard the story. 

I had also not yet connected the words “their child” to “their male child.” By 2022, there were 123 male school shooters and three female shooters. In 2014, Elliot Rodger (22) shot and killed six people, mostly women, outside a sorority house in California. After the shooting, authorities examined his online postings and discovered deeply misogynistic motives. Who’s the alpha male now, bitches, he wrote, along with, I will slaughter every single spoiled, stuck-up, blond slut I see in there, referring to the sorority house. 

Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook shooter, killed his mother before his rampage at the elementary school.

Salvador Ramos, the Uvalde shooter, shot his grandmother in the face before crashing her truck into Robb Elementary, barricading himself into adjoined fourth-grade classrooms, and opening fire. He started with the two female teachers. 

I would like to see my school and other schools take steps to reach out to students. A thought might be to organize a group of students and a few staff members who dedicate themselves to providing information about where a child can go for help, giving lectures to parents about the warning signs of potentially harmful youth, providing a place where students can anonymously report any incidents concerning peers that make them feel uncomfortable, etc. 

Red flag laws eventually passed in nineteen states. These laws allow community members—sometimes any concerned citizen and sometimes only members of law enforcement—to petition the state to prevent a person thought a danger to themselves or others from owning a firearm. I live in one of them. In my state, the law was enacted in 2018 after Nikolas Cruz (19) killed fourteen students and three staff members at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Preliminary studies have shown that red flag laws have not precipitated a drop in mass shootings, but have caused a measurable drop in gun-related suicides. 

After the Uvalde shooting—and before that, Houston, and before that, Parkland—my daughter’s school sent multiple emails with links for parents on how to talk to their children about the shooting. The first recommendation of the National Association of School Psychologist’s tips is to “reassure children that they are safe.”

Pointing fingers will not solve the problem. We need to recognize that there is a problem and get motivated to do something about it. 

I will grant my younger self this: I wrote the op-ed because the adults around us kept stumbling. They were trying to find that single thing—a video game, a violent movie, Marilyn Manson—to blame for Columbine. But my sixteen-year-old self did not name any single, specific cause and so did not pose any single, specific solution. She was right that there are no singular causes of gun violence, even for a single shooter. And thus no single preventative. Somewhere inside, she knew the reasons for Columbine were more complex. And she knew the answer to any individual act of violence had to be collective action. 

She hit the requisite mental health piece (though she would never have anticipated how hard it would be to find a therapist when she’s thirty-nine, and she did not know that the vast majority of people with mental illnesses are non-violent). And she placed the broadest blame on “society” for producing people capable of shooting children with bullets that strike with such force they create explosions more than ruptures. She did not mention capitalism, patriarchy, misogyny, trauma, or abuse, but she would learn about these terms later, as well as how our laws prop up some and fail to address others. 

She would be diagnosed with depression herself. She would attempt suicide twice—once just two years later, at age eighteen, and again at twenty-five. In her thirties, after her daughter was born, she would develop premenstrual dysphoric disorder, which would produce thoughts of suicide often enough that she would ask her husband, a born Alabamian who killed his first deer at age ten, never to keep a gun at home. The temptation, she would tell him. 

But in her article, she did not discuss the guns. 

At sixteen, I debated my grandfather on the front porch of the cottage about Bill Clinton’s impeachment, the Piss Christ, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. But I never questioned him about the guns in his shop. 

That’s because I preferred to pretend the shop didn’t exist. Those rooms in the garage weighted with objects that suggested purpose in their very design—a barrel is something to aim. When my grandfather and my younger cousin headed out there before dinner to look at the stock, I never followed them. I followed nearly all of my grandfather’s intellectual interests—literature and history and music—but I never asked him to teach me how to shoot. To impress my husband’s family, I shot a .22 rifle at a bullseye target exactly once in his parents’ backyard. The experience was not entirely unrelated to the sudden urge I felt later that year to drive my car off the road just outside Tuscaloosa. 

In “The Philosophy of the Technology of the Gun,” published in The Atlantic in 2012, five months before Sandy Hook, Evan Selinger explains that guns create a rhetorical situation—their very design teaches their audience how to use them. “To someone with a gun, the world takes on a distinct shape,” says Selinger. “It not only offers people, animals, and things to interact with, but also potential targets.” Selinger quotes French philosopher Bruno Latour, who said, “You are different with a gun in your hand; the gun is different with you holding it. You are another subject because you hold the gun; the gun is another object because it has entered into a relationship with you.” 

In other words, a human being holding a gun becomes a third thing—an alchemy of the two. 

On New Year’s Eve, when my grandfather’s blood alcohol level was above any state’s legal limit, he shot his guns across the lake at midnight into nothing he could see. I plugged my ears and stayed silent. My grandfather, who never belted me, who treated me so differently than my mother and her siblings, who could even be tender with me, falling asleep in a chair as I played the piano, became someone else with a gun in his hand. From this other person, I instinctively moved away.

My relatives sold some of Larry’s guns to a teacher from my old elementary school. I remember that the teacher wasn’t kind—he ridiculed kids struggling to read, he told kids who got in trouble about their fates in the prison system, he laughed when kids tripped in the halls. After his retirement, he opened a gun store of his own, and some of my grandfather’s guns were resold there. But the teacher also stocked other kinds of firearms. In the days before May 14, 2022 (ten days before the Uvalde shooting on May 24), the teacher sold an ArmaLite-15 rifle to a white man named Payton Gendron (18), who drove more than 200 miles to a grocery store in a predominantly Black neighborhood of Buffalo, New York and killed ten Black people. 

Our society has bred some of the finest minds we have ever seen. But it has also created children who have been persecuted so much they can no longer deal with it.

Human brains are not fully developed at age eighteen, when one can legally vote and buy cigarettes in America, or at twenty-one, when one can buy alcohol, but at twenty-five.

A year before the Buffalo shooting, one of Gendron’s teachers had referred him for a mental health evaluation after he threatened classmates and said he wanted to commit racially-motivated murder. He was hospitalized for a day and a half, then released. Local law enforcement determined his threats were not specific enough, and so he was not barred from buying the AR-15 later in order to execute Black people. 

After Buffalo, when I began to talk with others about my family’s role in gun violence, my mother reminded me that my grandfather, my uncle, my cousin—they all followed the laws in their gun sales. But what is the differences between legal and ethical culpability? Many states don’t require federal background checks at gun shows. Teenagers can legally purchase firearms before they can drink. Only convictions of domestic violence prevent someone from purchasing a gun. My grandfather committed domestic violence, but he was never publicly accused of it, arrested for it, charged with it, or convicted, and so he could legally own an entire store of guns.

What are the odds, I asked my mother, that in fifty years of the family’s business, no firearm has ever been sold to someone who used it to commit suicide? 

What are the odds no firearm sold by my family has ever been used to threaten an intimate partner? 

Why did my aunt say He finally killed Mom if she hadn’t believed the possibility had always been there? 

I don’t know, my mother said. 

I am tired of living in fear of losing a friend, a teacher, or possibly my own life because no one has bothered to seek out what we can do to keep this from happening.

When my daughter turned four, she started public school. On her second day of kindergarten, walking home with her father, a school bus pulled up alongside them, stalled in heavy traffic. An older boy, maybe ten or eleven, hung out the bus window, calling to my husband and child. When she’s older, the boy shouted, let me get her pussy. 

This community, I am positive, has the concerned, caring people within it who can help.

As a mother, I fixate on the details. 

In May 2022, the details were the Uvalde police officers who sat outside the school for an hour while the shooter killed children and teachers inside. The details were the mother who, once free of the handcuffs police used to restrain her, hopped the fence, entered the school, grabbed her two children, and ran away with them. 

But more than anything, the details were the children who kept calling 911 from their classrooms. There are eight or nine students left alive, one of them, a girl, told the operator from wherever she hid. 

I screamed when I realized she had to count.  

Please, let’s work hard to make our area a safer place for all of our youth to grow and live out their dreams in memory of all those children will never have the chance. 

To distract ourselves from a burning and infected world in the spring of 2021, our family planted a small garden in the shared backyard of our apartment building. We planted it in mid-April, twenty-two years after Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold entered their high school on April 2o with sawed-off shotguns and Tec-9s and homemade explosives. 

Like those teenage boys, like my grandfather and his endless interests—teeth, two-by-fours, pistols and rifles and revolvers—my husband is a resourceful person. In one corner of the raised bed he made out of loose bricks lying under our Boston triple-decker, he planted columbines, a flower unfamiliar to me. 

We learned that columbines don’t bloom until their second year. So, it wasn’t until May 2022, as millions of children in America practiced crouching on the floors of their classrooms, that purple flowers a few shades darker than a Colorado blue burst from the ground. When I turned the delicate blooms toward me, they looked like miniature irises—the kind that grew in the ravines and riverbanks of my upstate New York childhood. 

But an iris opens its mouth to the sun. A columbine bows its head.