12 Months and 1,200 Children
On the afternoon of 14 February 2018, a nineteen-year-old former student of Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School re-entered his school and killed three teachers and 14 students, armed with ammunition and a semi-automatic rifle. A year later, the Since Parkland report was published, documenting the lives of 1,200 children who were killed by guns over that twelve-month period.[i] This extract from the report outlines the project:
In Parkland, kids who endured the unspeakable emerged with a blunt message for the grownups of America: You are failing us. Their frustration was initially and primarily directed at elected officials in Washington and state capitals around the country, but it also extended to the media. Standing alongside their peers from Chicago, St. Louis, and the District of Columbia, they accurately criticized journalists for mobilizing to cover mass shootings while devoting relatively little attention to the chronic gun violence that exposes children in some city neighborhoods to danger every day. “Since Parkland” was conceived as an antidote to that imbalance — one powered by young people themselves.
Over the summer, more than 200 teen reporters from across the country began working together to document the children, ages zero to 18, killed in shootings during one year in America. The stories they collected go back to last February 14, the day of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, when at least three other kids were fatally shot in incidents that largely escaped notice. As the weeks went on, the stories came to include children lost to school shootings, as well as to armed domestic violence, drug homicides, unintentional discharges, and stray bullets. The stories do not include victims killed while fatally injuring someone else or in police-involved shootings, nor children who died in gun suicides …[ii] The student journalists are still working to report on the cases that continue to come in. The project is intended as work in progress …
The reporting you will read in “Since Parkland” is journalism in one of its purest forms — revealing the human stories behind the statistics — carried out on an exhaustive scale. Several partners supported the teen journalists in making it possible. The Trace, a non-profit news organization dedicated to reporting on gun violence, worked with journalism teachers to provide the students with training and editing. Another nonprofit, the Gun Violence Archive, maintains the running count of shooting incidents from which the project team identified child victims. The Miami Herald provided additional research … [and others] in the McClatchy newspaper group contributed stories in their areas… Ultimately, however, “Since Parkland” exists because of the doggedness of the young people who took it on. This was their story to tell, and it is told in their voices. Through their determination, we have gained an unprecedented account of the full scale and contours of gun violence as it impacts American children.[iii]
I have written before about guns in the US, and the perverse and perverted interpretations of the Second Amendment. However, here I want to focus on what the project did so well, revealing the unrealised potential of the lives lost, and how we are diminished by each and every death.
The statistics are easy. The stories are loosely allocated to themes, categorised as 80 infants and toddlers, 300+ siblings (many of whom were too young to have fallen under one of the other headings that follow), 30 artists, 100 jokesters, 60 young parents, 200 athletes, 40 college-bound seniors, 30 adventurers, 80 musicians, 200 friends, 40 community volunteers, 100 diligent students, 50 gamers, 30 dancers and 100 stories yet to be told. The biographies are brief, close to heart-breaking, and often hard to accept. One page on the website is a seemingly never-ending list of names. The first eighteen include all fourteen of the teenagers shot during six minutes at the high school.[iv] Reading each of them brings home what the phrase ‘a life cut short’ means.
I have read several of the background stories from the report, covering youngsters ranging from toddlers to teenagers . Their deaths include accidents, often from children playing with guns, through to revenge killings and domestic violence. In some cases, there was no reason for the victim being shot other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The majority of the victims are male, as are the overwhelming percentage of shooters. I am not going to ask you to read through the stories as I have done, as it is almost overwhelming to read about each one, not just their character and achievements, but also about the next stage in each life, already in planning but never to be realised. But please read some, as this project deserves attention. It doesn’t set out a plan of what to do to stop this litany of death. Instead, it is a dramatic way of making it clear that something needs to be done, or, more to the point, has to be done.
I am a supporter of the Sandy Hook Promise, a non-profit set up to support ways to “protect children from gun violence by encouraging and supporting solutions that create safer, healthier homes, schools and communities”, established after the shooting of 20 children aged between 6 and seven years old in December 2012 (as well as six teachers).[v] That organisation has sought to have gun controls introduced, teachers and parents better informed about guns and the risks they bring, and even help in creating safer classrooms. They have several excellent proposals, while the Since Parkland project provides the emotional power needed to get commitment to change. It should be on computers in every school in the country, and on memory sticks for every parent.
However, one of my most strongly felt observations about the project has to do with the teenage journalists. Succinctly, they have documented one terrible story after another, each one of them reporting on six deaths. As you discover, they are neutral observers, offering a brief set of facts, and sometimes asking for more information. But as I read, I wondered what impact this task had on them. They would have talked to distraught family members, mothers, siblings, grandparents. They would have met with schoolfriends, boyfriends and girlfriends. They would have heard anger and anguish. They certainly would have understood the impact of a life cut short.
Many articles have written about the ‘survivors’ of Parkland, the students who were witness to the massacre. But these young journalists are survivors, too, witnesses to gun deaths: I am sure they will all have been marked by what they heard; I hope, desperately hope, they survive the burden of what they chose to document. The voices will live on in them for a long time. [vi]
I found Since Parkland more emotionally draining than I had anticipated. Name after name, story after story: so many lives wasted and so much future promise unrealised. In part it is the very volume of the exercise that becomes overwhelming. You read one back story, then another, then another. You look down the page, and all you can see is there are so many more.
What kind of foolishness affected the US Supreme Court in 2008, just eleven years ago, to strike down provisions of the Firearms Control Regulations Act of 1945, and interpret the Second Amendment (“A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed”) to mean that individuals have a right “to possess a firearm, unconnected with service in a militia, for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home”, and that the District of Columbia’s handgun ban and requirement that lawfully-owned rifles and shotguns be kept “unloaded and disassembled or bound by a trigger lock” violated this guarantee? The determination added that “the right to bear arms is not unlimited and that guns and gun ownership would continue to be regulated”.[vii]
We have militia in the US today, state and federal military forces, whose access to and use of firearms is strictly controlled by the military. We also have a raggle-taggle of unregulated private citizens’ groups who shouldn’t be allowed to own a slingshot. The Court’s decision unleashed a disaster, as US civilians now own an estimated 400m guns, a number still increasing in 2018.[viii] The Court’s final resolution about gun and gun ownership continuing to be regulated was an open invitation, immediately taken up, to seek less and less regulation across the country.
My anger about this is pushing me off course. To focus: the Since Parkland project is about a lot more than the availability of guns. I think the issue I battle to get straight in my head has to do with that NRA statement that guns don’t kill people, people kill people. Guns are used to kill people, and they do so very effectively. The fact that a nineteen-year-old can walk into a school with a semi-automatic rifle is horrific, unacceptable. No-one should be able to buy a semi-automatic rifle: they are for military uses only. No-one who is disturbed, or is under psychiatric treatment, or is an ex-offender, should be able to acquire any kind of gun: there are loopholes, wide open in some states, and they should be closed. Obviously, no-one should be able to walk into a school with any kind of gun, but here I don’t know how we can prevent that. Changing and controlling access to guns would be a huge, essential and very necessary step forward. But the stories from Since Parkland are about people killing people, too, using guns to do so.
I have kept thinking about the stories I read in the report. They reveal all kinds of anger that pushed a man (it was almost always a man) to resort to using a gun. Slighted by a girlfriend talking to another young man. Unable to cope with the breakup of a marriage. Having an argument over a sports team or feeling cheated over a drug transaction. In so many ways, these stories reveal individuals under extreme pressure, and the only outlet for their anger translated into a desire to hurt, and then to go on to kill. Restricting access to firearms will make a difference, but these weapons are enablers, instantaneous, and bloodily effective of course. That leaves the other problem that has to be addressed as well. What can we do to replace anger by understanding, violence by caring, aggression by consideration? Can we reduce the desire to kill?
For years I have been a critic of the portrayal of violence on television and in the cinema. A few days ago, I was struck by a friend’s comment about a television series she had begun to watch, and then abandoned: “It was too dark, too violent.” That serials and films show people being killed, shot by handguns and rifles seems commonplace today. That videos, television shows and books relentlessly repeat stories centred on men’s sadistic behaviour, and violence towards women in particular, is so much the character of everyday fiction it goes by without comment. Violence permeates news reports, too. We only notice when it is “too dark”, or “too violent”.
It is not just the entertainment media. There is a deep culture in this country that has its roots in the individual as pioneer, pushing back the frontier, resourceful, taming the wild, self-reliant with gun in hand: the ‘heroes’ who built America. It had its virtues in hard work, religious devotion, and loyalty. It had its pride in creating a republic and in overthrowing a distant monarchy. At the same time, it was a white culture, oppressive, patriarchal, exercising vigilante justice, riding on the backs of slaves, clearing the prairie of native Americans. That history is about a time and a world long gone, but it lingers on now, like a dead hand over the country.
I am an optimist at heart, firmly believing that slowly things improve, and that we can do better. But ‘Since Parkland’ made me feel angry, demoralised and utterly powerless, asking “what can be done?” Then I read to the end, and especially the comments of the teenage journalists:
Despite the emotional toll, students said they were determined to tell the stories of these young victims — many of whom received limited news coverage when they died. “I had not the best view of journalism, I think just because I only associated it with my local news, where I had seen so many negative stories,” said McGee, who used music and cooking as coping strategies throughout the project. Now, she plans to pursue a career as a long-form reporter. “I didn’t know how different and multifaceted journalism could be.”
Several of the teen journalists said they could not help but see themselves in the kids they covered. During the reporting process, they often discovered that they shared something in common with the victims they were writing about: the same hometown, the same hobbies, the same age. Those small connections reinforced the magnitude of their task. “Every now and then, I’ll be writing or editing a profile and I’ll think, well this kid that I’m writing about could have been writing,” said Meyerson. “They could have been a part of The Trace project.”
McGee remembers writing the profile of 18-year-old Nasjay Murry, in whom she saw shades of herself. Both young women were the oldest of three. Both were close to their families and babysat their siblings while in school. And both were accepted to Ivy League schools: McGee will leave her home in Detroit to attend Princeton University in the fall. And Murry had landed a spot at Brown University, just months before she was killed at a party. She would have been the first in her family to graduate from college.
It took me time to get there, but I saw I’d missed a critical point. The 200 teenage journalists are the future: they won’t forget what they heard; they won’t forget how they felt; and they are part of a generation which will make certain change happens. We have to get their story out, promote Since Parkland, and support the other initiatives this generation adopts. They are the future, but, please, they shouldn’t have to face the burden of ‘12 months and 1200 children’ year after year.
[i] https://sinceparkland.org/
[ii] During the same time, it is estimated around 900-1,000 children died in gun related suicides.
[iii] Please go to the website to read more, especially the words of the teenage journalists.
[iv] In the March for Our Lives rally in Washington, Emma Gonzalez was on stage for 6 minutes and 21 seconds, the duration of the shooting. She gave the names and stories of the 14 students, and then stood in silence. If you didn’t see it, you should: https://www.thecut.com/2018/03/emma-gonzalez-march-for-our-lives-speech-silence.html
[v] This was the school massacre that brought out the right wing, with broadcaster Alan Jones claiming it was all a fake, an attempt to overturn the Second Amendment, that there were no bodies, and the students were trained actors. He is being sued for his comments, but his outrageous claims are being continued by others.
[vi] The project coordinator’s tasks included counselling, and she kept in regular contact with every one of them.
[vii] District of Columbia v. Heller, 554, U.S. 570, 2008. My emphasis to highlight the crazy wording here.
[viii] https://www.thetrace.org/rounds/how-many-guns-do-americans-own/
