Noah Orona still had not cried.
The 10-year-old’s father, Oscar, couldn’t understand it. Just hours earlier, a stranger with a rifle had walked into the boy’s fourth-grade classroom at Robb Elementary School and opened fire, slaughtering his teachers and classmates in front of him. One round struck Noah in the shoulder blade, carving a 10-inch gash through his back before popping out and spraying his right arm with shrapnel. He’d laid amid the blood and bodies of his dead friends for an hour, maybe more, waiting for help to come.
But there he was, resting in his hospital bed, his brown eyes vacant, his voice muted.
“I think my clothes are ruined,” Noah lamented.
It was okay, his dad assured him. He would get new clothes.
“I don’t think I’m going to get to go back to school,” he said.
“Don’t worry about it,” his father insisted, squeezing his son’s left hand.
“I lost my glasses,” the boy continued. “I’m sorry.”
(John Woodrow Cox. “What school shootings do to the kids who survive them, from Sandy Hook to Uvalde.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/05/28/survivors-school-shootings-uvalde-sandy-hook/. The Washington Post. May 28, 2022.)
Body counts of children and adults who die in school shootings dominate headlines and consume the public’s attention. However, the effect of such tragedies do not end there. Fragile, innocent children who survived the murderous crossfire of school shootings reveal the true scope of this epidemic in the United States. Hundreds of thousands of children’s lives have been profoundly changed by school shootings.
More than 360 children and adults, including Noah, have been injured on K-12 campuses since 1999, according to a Washington Post database. And then there are the children who suffer no physical wounds at all, but are still haunted for years by what they saw or heard or lost.
Please, read John Woodrow
Cox's accounts of these young survivors by clicking here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/05/28/survivors-school-shootings-uvalde-sandy-hook/?utm_campaign=wp_must_reads&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_mustreads&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F36f5bde%2F62921bf2956121755a964dd0%2F5e60092f9bbc0f2194729950%2F36%2F119%2F62921bf2956121755a964dd0
As I read Noah's story, I think of the horrible aftermath of the massacre at Robb Elementary School. The grief, the pain, the PTSD – you must consider the broad scope of the shooter's deadly actions. As a youngster, Noah even worried about his ruined clothes and his lost glasses. These concerns speak volumes about the reality of what happened in Uvalde, Texas. They speak specifically of the tremendous impact gun violence has on the everyday lives of American children.
On May 24, 2022, a deranged 19-year-old there fatally shot nineteen students and two teachers, and wounded seventeen other people. People will remember his heinous act as the deadliest school shooting in modern Texas history. However, that ungodly distinction does not begin to relate the impinging fear and dread suffered by the innocent students. Surviving a war zone, they now cope with a lifetime of anxiety triggered by this terrifying event.
A woman cries as she hugs a child, during a community gathering at the Uvadle County Fairplex, following a mass shooting at the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.
No One Can Heal All the Damage Done
Uvalde is a small town built around ranching and farming, where “everybody knows each other.” The town has a population of about 15,000 people, and it is the seat of a mostly rural county of the same name with a total population less than double that number. The town’s population is majority Hispanic.
Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District serves about 4,000 students and employs more than 730 full-time staff members across eight campuses. It has as its motto “Loyal and true.” For many of its residents, the idea that the town’s schools would be anything other than a place of learning and safety was inconceivable.
At El Taco Madre food stand on Evans Street, Mike Palacios sells street tacos, nachos and other Tex-Mex favorites. In recent years, Palacios said, Uvalde has kept crime at a minimum and is mostly a peaceful place. Once a predominately white town, it has become “a melting pot” with a thriving Hispanic community, he said.
At El Taco Madre food stand on Evans Street, Mike Palacios sells street tacos, nachos and other Tex-Mex favorites. In recent years, Palacios said, Uvalde has kept crime at a minimum and is mostly a peaceful place. Once a predominately white town, it has become “a melting pot” with a thriving Hispanic community, he said.
“We’re just a small community that sticks together,” said Palacios, who has lived in Uvalde for 14 years. “You’re driving down the road, and the opposite car’s saying hi, and everybody is just real friendly.”
“I believe that we will get through this,” said Palacios, the food stand owner. “We are Uvalde and we are Uvalde strong,” he said.
(Shari Biediger, Brooke Crum and Raquel Torres. “A snapshot of Uvalde: A town built around ranching and farming, where ‘everybody knows each other.'” San Antonio Report. May 29, 2022.)
Hundreds of mourners packed the bleachers lining the Uvalde Fairplex rodeo arena for a somber prayer vigil Wednesday night, just a day after the shooting. Many of the devastated mourners, who mostly wore Uvalde High School merchandise emblazoned with a coyote mascot, became hysterical when a solo violinist closed the vigil with a rendition of “Amazing Grace”.
“We pray for the little children who saw what happened to their friends,” Baptist Temple Church pastor Tony Gruben said.
“And we pray that God will heal their little hearts and their little souls. God is within Uvalde, she will not fall.”
(Jack Morphet and Jesse O’Neill ‘Heal their little hearts and souls:’ Uvalde residents hold tearful prayer vigil.” New York Post. May 26, 2022.)
Uvalde community members grieve at a vigil Wednesday, May 25, 2022 remembering the victims of the Robb Elementary School massacre.
Time will heal much. As Palacios said, Uvalde will strengthen. As Gruban prayed, healing will occur. But, nothing will erase all of the aftermath of the massacre. Nothing will stop the impressionable children who survived from worrying about their school, the clothes they wear, their personal effects, and now about whether such an unthinkable act could happen again.
I mourn for the souls lost in school shootings, and I mourn that we all must imagine and fear a deadly world where children suffer for the cruel transgressions of hateful killers with guns. In a nation where so many put their preference for deadly firearms above their concern for young lives, I mourn for what may be yet to come.
I'll end with the words of Dr. Gerard Lawson, a licensed professional counselor and longtime Virginia Tech professor, Tuesday’s massacre brought back gut-wrenching memories of an all-too-familiar experience. As Lawson recalls being locked down on his university’s campus on April 16, 2007, as a gunman went on a rampage throughout the school, killing 33 people.
“There is a feeling of powerlessness that keeps coming back up for people that have been down this road,” Lawson told Yahoo News.
Fifteen years after that firsthand experience with violent tragedy, he continues to help those affected – including survivors, their families and the immediate community – grieve through something that, he says, continues to haunt many of them to this day. It’s the trajectory of a healing process he suspects many members of the Uvalde community have begun to grapple with as well.
“There’s going to be an evolution in how they experience this,” Lawson said, which will vary for fellow students, teachers, first responders and community members.
After such an extreme tragedy, he said, there will be the immediate feelings of grief, loss and fear engulfing the Texas town. He predicts that the community will come together to share resources, but eventually those resources will subside and, before long, another tragedy will draw the focus away.
“There’s some disillusionment after a while when that honeymoon period sort of leads to ‘I've got so much still to do’ and ‘Are we truly safe?’” Lawson said.
(Marquise Francis. “The Uvalde community will experience an 'evolution' of trauma in the coming days, weeks and months, say mental health experts.” Yahoo News. May 26, 2022.)
“Are we truly safe?” Those words haunt us because we have never come together as a nation of concerned individuals to address the epidemic of gun violence. And, one thing is indisputable in the available data – and the data is limited since until recently the federal government was effectively barred from gathering it. The indisputable fact is that where there are more guns, there are more gun deaths.
Studies have found this to be true at the state and national level. It is true for homicides, suicides, mass shootings and even police shootings. It is an intuitive idea: If guns are more available, people will use them more often.
I must sadly report that there are more gun deaths in Texas, by far, than in any other state, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Texas suffered 4,164 gun deaths in 2020, the most recent year for which the CDC has published data. That's a rate of 14.2 deaths per 100,000 Texans.
God bless the children in Uvalde. I pray Americans will finally realize we must protect all vulnerable people from the violence of firearms. The first step is working together to study the research about the problem and then pass much-needed legislation to help stop the slaughter.
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