Guns, trauma, reflection

On the Brown shooting

Prefacing this essay: I don’t plan on editing this in any meaningful way. There will likely be grammatical mistakes and disgusting prose—don’t crucify me.

I was supposed to come home from my first semester of college this upcoming Thursday.

Instead, it is Monday: I’m sitting on my childhood bed, two hundred miles away from my college campus, not having taken any of my final exams. I am a first-year student at Brown University (as you all know, reading this), and I sit here at home because our community fell victim to a mass shooting—the 389th in the United States this year.

I had always felt that Brown was going to be my safe space. On my third day of high school, we had a bomb threat—an experience I’m sure is now common among my generation—and I went to school every day for the rest of my time there wondering whether we’d be locked down again for something that wasn’t only a threat. There never was, and I graduated high school thinking—naïvely—that I’d made it through the period-of-worst-odds in regard to being victim of a school shooting. Brown was supposed to be a sanctuary: compared to my high school, they have all of the resources and money needed to prevent such an atrocity from occurring in the first place (and a whole department of public safety!). I thought I would, at the very least, be safe.

On Saturday, I was proven wrong. At 4:22 p.m., I got the alert system warning that every student wishes to never be sent:

Cue the worst day of my life. Locked down, in my dorm room, for 14 hours: minimal food and water (partly my fault; I woke up at 3 p.m.), no bathroom, barricaded door, lights off. Constant worry of what is happening outside; constant fear that he might visit our dorm floor next. Little to no information of what is really happening—50 hours after the first alert, there is still no primary suspect (two incorrect ones, though).

And yet, I am, by far, one of the lucky ones.

I was not in the room or the building where the shooting occurred. I did not have to hear the gunshots; I did not have to hear the screams; I did not have to get repeatedly searched and held at gunpoint by law enforcement. I was not one of the two students murdered or one of the nine injured—one of the eight still fighting in the hospital. I was not one of the close friends or family members of the wounded or killed.

I was, relatively speaking, very lucky to have been where I was when the shooting happened. And yet, I am destroyed. Our community is devastated: thousands of students, professors, and other faculty who will never respond to loud sounds or police sirens in the same way ever again—will never feel safe again. The point is this: I was never acutely aware of (despite how obvious it sounds) how widespread the effect of such a tragedy is. Whether that is due to the gun violence epidemic that plagues our country or some other reason, I do not know. All I know is this: there are not only eleven victims in this crime. There are thousands.

I do not mean to sound selfish. I feel absolutely, truly horrible for my classmates who were killed—children who worked their entire lives to make it to such a prestigious school, just to have it stripped away by a senseless murderer (and, more importantly, children who had just as much of a right to live as anyone else, regardless of their commitment to education). I feel terrible for those who were injured or are still in the hospital, and for the families who sent their children to school hoping that they would remain safe. I feel for everyone who was present or in closer proximity to the shooting than I, and for everyone else on campus. I feel for those who remain on campus, despite the shooter remaining at large, due to inability to fund or find a sooner trip home (or without the ability to go home in any capacity).

Nothing can overstate just how devastating this is to the Brown community and to every student that is a part of it. I keep thinking about how two students didn’t get the chance to see our first snow of the semester or how they will never be able to walk back out of the Van Wickle Gates upon graduation. Every time I see or hear police cars or sirens, I tense up and channel all of my focus into preventing a panic attack. There are likely thousands of my classmates who feel the same way—a permanent effect on the psyche of us all. Compound this with each of the 389 shootings this year in our country—the thousands we’ve had previously—and it almost becomes an understatement that mass gun violence is only an epidemic.

It kind of feels like how I think about car accidents: everyone gets into one at some point, you just have to hope yours isn’t that bad. I hate that this is the way I think about it, but it’s true.

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It is worth mentioning, though, how the Brown community has stepped up in these moments of need. The number of offers by parents, students, and other faculty to house students or fund their travel home has been astonishing and, frankly, makes me feel a little bit better about having to step foot back on campus in the spring. Despite this tragedy and ongoing investigation, I remain proud to be a student at Brown, and the community response has only bolstered that feeling.

Also, I can’t really tell if focusing on the effect this event had on me is selfish, considering there are so many people who are more directly affected. I think I addressed it well enough in the body, but please tell me if this is insensitive. Thanks.