Gun violence creeps ever closer to home
I was 10 years old when Charles Whitman strafed the University of Texas with bullets. After stabbing his wife and mother to death early one morning, he went to the college campus in Austin, made his way up to the observation deck on the 28th floor of the clock tower, and shot 14 people dead and wounded more than 30 others before police killed him.
The year was 1966, and nothing in my young life helped me put that monstrosity into context. Whitman was an angry young man with mental health issues, and that kind of bloodshed was happening elsewhere, like Vietnam. And like that country, Texas was so far away.
And so Whitman's spasm of violence was an anomaly, easily tucked away as something that had no personal relevance for me.
I was married with three daughters when two troubled teenagers killed 13 people at Columbine High School in 1999. One daughter was in high school, the other two in junior high.
While still a relatively singular event in its scope and ferocity, it hit closer to home. There were kids in our schools who looked and acted and were treated as Columbine's two killers were reported to have looked and acted and been treated. I watched terrorized students and teachers escaping from the school as the event unfolded live on television and I could envision my own daughters and their friends and teachers escaping from our own schools. The agita was more concrete, more unsettling, but still distant and isolated enough to be tucked away, though not quite so easily.
I was the grandfather of a 2-year-old boy when a troubled young man killed 20 students and six teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut in 2012. Twenty children, just 6 and 7 years old, every bit as innocent as my own grandson, who was less than a year away from entering nursery school. I started to wonder whether there was any place, no matter how wholesome and pure, that could be immune from that kind of violence.
And now — with two new grandchildren, a girl four months old and a boy on this earth barely a week, and with that first grandson now in middle school, and with one daughter and her husband teaching in an elementary school and another a college professor — comes Uvalde. And it comes not only with its own singular horror, but pulsing with the reverberations of so many other horrors in so many other schools, from Parkland, Florida to Santa Fe, Texas to Oxford, Michigan.
And you look at your daughters and at those precious grandchildren and you want desperately to be able to tuck it away in some remote recess in your brain and write it off as yet another anomaly, but you can't because it's all too real and all too relentless, but you have to if you want to maintain your sanity because dwelling on the hideous potential will drive you insane. But you can't dismiss it because it would be irresponsible not to prepare and care for someone you love unconditionally, but you have to because these innocents deserve to live the lives of children without the fears that can be consuming.
And where does that leave us?
Should we teach them how to cover themselves in a classmate's blood and play dead? Should we buy them Kevlar backpacks? Should we practice staying silent with them for hours on end? Should we explain to them why for God's sake we need to have a National Gun Violence Awareness Day?
Or should we explain to ourselves that calling the evil we saw years ago an anomaly was a self-deception that has come back to haunt us? Because you can't fix some problems by wishing them away.
Columnist Michael Dobie's opinions are his own.
Michael Dobie is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
