It’s astonishing how fast it happens.
How the unthinkable becomes thinkable.
How the unconscionable becomes conscious.
How the rare becomes routine.
School shootings have become so normalized that the only reason we’re even talking about this one is because the shooter was… a girl.
Pause on that for a second. A girl.That’s what it takes to get our attention now—a plot twist. Because the old narrative of children running for their lives in a place of learning is old news. Boring.
And it happened fast. It was not so long ago that there was ONE shooting in a year.
School shootings have always been the red herring in the coal mine. The glaring, neon-lit sign that society is failing. And I remember when they shook us. When they shattered our innocence. When we stood in collective disbelief and whispered, How could this happen?
Flash forward to 2024: This “unique” tragedy marks the 322nd school shooting of the year. Yes, you read that right. Three hundred. Twenty. Two.
It’s no longer shocking. It’s background noise.
And I see it in my own actions. I used to dance around the issue of school shootings with my kids—sugarcoating, sidestepping, even lying. But now? Now it’s just another headline. Another piece of passing conversation.
“Hey mom, did you see the shooter this time was a girl?”
They say it the way I might say, “Did you see it’s supposed to rain tomorrow?”And I can’t even blame them.
Because when the unimaginable happens 322 times, it stops being unimaginable.
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