Before the recent shooting at Kennesaw State University hit the news, my nineteen-year-old daughter witnessed it firsthand. My husband and I were away in Austin when she called us, sobbing. After assuring us that she was physically okay, she told us of the nightmare that had just taken place before her.
She and her best friend had been spending a quiet Saturday afternoon on the ground floor of a campus dorm, when they heard several gunshots, close by.
“Mom, people asking, ‘Are those gunshots?’ Must have never heard real gunshots. There’s no mistaking them,” she cried.
Startled, my daughter and her friend looked out their window, and saw a young girl lying on the pavement nearby with “blood all over her.” My daughter called 911, and she and her friend ran to gather a washcloth and a belt. They could see that the victim’s arm had been shot, and they thought they could help by fashioning a tourniquet for the wound. But the 911 responder told them not to approach the wounded girl, for fear that the shooter might still be in the area.
So, they watched. As the girl’s bloody body twitched on the pavement, they helplessly watched her bleed her life away before first responders could reach her. And later, my husband and I listened helplessly from hundreds of miles away as our girl wept and wept and wept.
Now, the parents of that dear young woman who was shot and killed by yet another angry man with a gun received a far more devastating phone call that Saturday. But hearing about the horror that my daughter had witnessed and how it was affecting her was gut-wrenching, nonetheless.
The trauma of a nation that lives in the shadow of constant school shootings, and movie theater shootings, and club shootings, and concert shootings, and church shootings, and hospital shootings, and library shootings, and synagogue shootings and grocery store shootings and office building shootings is somehow not enough to persuade us to re-evaluate our approach to firearms. I don’t think Americans want to live this way, but there are those of us who are so fixated on what some people might possibly lose, that they have missed the magnitude of all that we have already lost.
The young woman who was shot full of bullets on a college campus and left for dead should not have been killed. My daughter and the millions of others like her who have been victimized somehow by the sudden eruption of gun violence into their lives should not have to see the same images of blood and death that soldiers on the field of war might witness. We have made our entire public life into a shooting gallery in the name of “safety” and “freedom”.
What freedom is this?
Are we safe, yet?
