Take care of yourselves 🖤
CW: The following content centers around last week's events in Uvalde, Texas. If you feel like it may be too much, you won't hurt my feelings if you skip this email and return next week 🖤 —Emily
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I grew up in a post-9/11 world where active shooter drills and code red lockdowns are part of everyday life in a public school classroom. My parents are both teachers and now I cover education on a daily basis. I knew a Stoneman Douglas victim and covered the tragedy as things unfolded. It doesn't make last week's events any less traumatizing.
My heart aches for you — my regular readers and friends — students, parents, teachers community members.
I'm tired. I feel sick. I'm constantly worried another incident will somehow be even closer to home. I don't really know what else to say this week, so I'm including some of the thoughtful, more nuanced coverage from Uvalde I've seen so far that goes beyond the surface.
Gun Violence Survivors Share Impact, How it Changed Their Lives
This is the reality of living in America: Bri is terrified to send her younger sisters to school and hopes to move out of the United States before she has her own children. Caitlyn’s parents both work in schools and she’s had nightmares that they don’t make it home. Emma remembers the fear of school shootings from her time in high school and doesn’t want her future children to live under the same pall. Helena loves live music but can’t go to concerts or crowded places anymore without having panic attacks. Ashley’s husband is a teacher and if she doesn’t hear from him during the day, she checks the local news. If Lex goes to a movie theater, she spends the whole time looking over her shoulder for possible gunmen. Mahiyah makes sure she always knows where the exits are, just in case. Teen Vogue
‘This Could Be Our School': Educators Grapple With Anger and Loss After Uvalde Shooting
At Western Branch Middle School in Chesapeake, Va., students were asking about the rituals that color the end of school year: state tests, the dance, the menu and activities for field day, an upcoming award ceremony.
“It could be that students may not be watching the news,” S. Kambar Khoshaba, the school’s principal, said a day after yet another mass shooting at one of the nation’s schools. “How much of it do they know? Are they getting numb to it because you keep hearing a lot about school shootings?” EdWeek
Dallas kids process Uvalde shooting: ‘I feel scared this will happen to us’
Michelle Davis stood in front of her third-grade class and urged them to be open and honest. It’s OK to talk about how they feel, she said.
“How many of you know what happened yesterday?” the F.P. Caillet Elementary teacher asked.
Every hand went up.
Here at the northwest Dallas school — 367 miles from the massacre in Uvalde — 9-year-olds aren’t shielded from the gruesome reality of school shootings. They all knew the age of the gunman who terrorized a small, Texas town Tuesday. And when one student told the class that the shooter had also targeted his mother, another third grader corrected him: No, it was actually his grandma that he shot.
Bouncing between Spanish and English, Davis’ class worked through what it feels like to be in an elementary classroom — one filled with a rainbow reading carpet and a letter-sounds wall and a Happy Birthday calendar — the day after a similar space became the site of Texas’ deadliest school shooting.
These children said they want to see action following the slaying of 19 children and two adults. Dallas Morning News
Be angry about Texas elementary school shooting. We owe the 19 children killed our rage.
As we grieve the 19 children murdered by this armed monster, we owe it to them to be angry – righteously, furiously angry – at a system that seems to value guns more than it ever valued them. USA Today Opinion
Column: A Latino-on-Latino mass shooting. What now?
When I heard that a gunman had killed multiple schoolchildren in a predominantly Latino town in Texas, I immediately thought: white supremacist.
How could I not?
Just this month, a white man allegedly murdered 10 Black people in Buffalo, N.Y., while railing against Latino “replacers” in an online manifesto.
The mass shooting is already among the 10 worst in U.S. history. In four, most of the victims were Latino: the 1984 San Ysidro massacre in a McDonald’s, the 2017 Orlando Pulse nightclub massacre, the El Paso massacre three years ago and now Uvalde, a town where nearly three-quarters of residents are Latino and the school district is more than 90% Latino.
Yet a Latino had never been the killer in any those or any of the other 10 worst mass shootings — until [this shooter]. LA Times
America’s unique, enduring gun problem, explained
Tuesday’s mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, 10 days after a mass shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, has once again brought American exceptionalism on gun violence into stark relief.
No other high-income country has suffered such a high death toll from gun violence. Every day, more than 110 Americans die at the end of a gun, including suicides and homicides, an average of 40,620 per year. ... Gun control opponents, including virtually every Republican, have typically framed the gun violence epidemic in the US as a symptom of a broader mental health crisis. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott reiterated that rhetoric in a press conference, suggesting that improving access to mental health resources, not reevaluating his state’s lax gun laws, should be the primary response to the Uvalde shooting.
But every country has people suffering from mental health issues and extremists like the Buffalo shooter; those problems aren’t unique. What is unique is the US’s expansive view of civilian gun ownership, ingrained in politics, in culture, and in the law since the nation’s founding, and a national political process that has so far proved incapable of changing that norm. Vox
I hope you all take care of yourselves. We'll chat next week.
—Emily Bloch, youth culture and education reporter
Emily Bloch is a youth culture and education reporter for The Florida Times-Union. Follow her on Twitter or email her. Sign up for her newsletter.
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Take care of yourselves 🖤
