After All This | annotated by Mark

On April 20, 1999, my college roommates and I huddled together watching the news, not understanding what was happening. In Columbine, Colorado, seventy-six miles away from us, kids were running out of a high school, hands on their heads. I would begin student teaching in the fall. Two other roommates were student teaching already, coming back each day with glitter on their hands. Another had graduated and was working as a substitute, with a full-time job lined up for August. On TV the reporters described two shooters wearing black trench coats and carrying guns. We would soon find out they were only boys. They planted bombs in the cafeteria, then shot up the school, killing or maiming thirty-six people.

In the weeks that followed, our education professors calmed our fears. They discussed the rarity of such an event; they predicted that dramatic shifts would happen. They mentioned stronger laws around gun ownership and background checks and punishment for the people who sold the guns and the parents who allowed the boys access to those weapons. They spoke of change that was sure to come now, “after all this.”

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.

Merriam-Webster’s definition of militia:

1a: a part of the organized armed forces of a country liable to call only in emergency

1b: a body of citizens organized for military service

2: the whole body of able-bodied male citizens declared by law as being subject to call to military service

3: a private group of armed individuals that operates as a paramilitary force and is typically motivated by a political or religious ideology

specifically: such a group that aims to defend individual rights against government authority that is perceived as oppressive.

I want to determine the founders’ intentions when they wrote the Second Amendment. Maybe diagramming the sentence would help me better understand its true meaning. When I try to think of someone I could ask about the Second Amendment and grammar, I remember a professor from my grad-school days. But he was shot and killed by his girlfriend’s abusive ex years ago.

After twenty-five years as a teacher, I should know better than to enter into an escalated conversation with a middle school student. He stared coolly ahead as I slipped into lecture mode about his lack of motivation. Then he snapped, “Get the fuck out of my face.” I told my sister, “If I’m shot tomorrow, I know which student it will be.”

In 1840 John Anthony Gardner Davis, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, was shot by a student and died three days later. This is the earliest documented case of gun violence in schools that I can find. Davis tried to stop two students who were rioting. When he attempted to unmask one to determine his identity, the student spun around and shot him.

I have entered groups of students circled around fights like spectators at a boxing match, taunting and screaming at each blow. I’ve tried to disperse the crowd, tried to distract and interrupt those fighting, and even hauled one student off another, only belatedly realizing the danger I’d put myself in. John Anthony Gardner Davis did what many teachers do every day.

Seven years after Davis’s death, the student who’d killed him took his own life with a gun.

When my twin sons came home from kindergarten years ago, they told my husband and me they’d hid from the “bad man,” but there wasn’t a real bad man. It was an active shooter drill. They and their classmates had hid underneath the cabinets in their classroom, their bodies fitting together like a life-size 3D puzzle. They told me the teacher had to reprimand some students for giggling. I flashed back to teaching at a high school summer program where we had an intruder. I turned off the lights, locked the door, and made the kids huddle in the corner of the room—the safety protocol at the time. Two boys wouldn’t stop talking and laughing. In a whisper I reminded them of Columbine, just three years earlier. I told them this was serious. They continued joking like it was practice. It wasn’t practice.

Every day I lock my classroom door. It’s both a school policy and a time-saver in case there’s an active shooter. Every day I know I could be shot.

The school district builds a chain-link fence around our middle school. Some teachers say they feel safer, say, “It’s about time.” I feel less secure. Though it’s always possible that a random person would try to enter the school, that’s not what I fear. The guns are already here. The guns are in the students’ waistbands and backpacks. The fence traps us in. Before, we could run south past a community center, southeast through a field and a basketball court, west across a major street, east or north into neighborhoods. Now we have to walk single file through a gate. I ask my classes, “Who can climb the fence?” Almost all of my students raise their hands. The fence is no deterrent to outsiders. And if you’re being shot at from inside, the fence will slow you down.

At my first job, in a large, urban high school, the principal and assistants went around one day and scoured each room. They asked the teachers if we’d seen anything suspicious. I learned later they were looking for a bomb.

At that same high school a boy walked with a weapon under his shirt into the principal’s office and demanded to see him immediately, frantically. Once inside his office, the boy laid a handgun on the desk. Said he’d found it in a trash can in the boys’ restroom. He didn’t know what else to do.

The fall before my sons entered ninth grade, there were three incidents involving guns at the high school in our neighborhood in Albuquerque, New Mexico: A student was shot dead next to the football field while fighting over the ghost gun he’d stolen from another student. A gun accidently fired when it dropped from a student’s waistband, luckily injuring no one; the student ran from the classroom, and police apprehended him in a nearby park. Two guns were found in a kid’s backpack.

In other schools across the city eleven guns were discovered during the first semester.

These are the guns they found, the guns the district is willing to tell us about.

When a high school senior who attends a prestigious private school in town is shot and killed at a party, I think of the teachers who have her essays or exams on their desks.

My school is in lockdown. One hour passes. Two. We don’t know what to think. The principal announces there’s no immediate need to worry. Texts from other teachers say the campus police officers are looking for a gun. They think the kid hid it somewhere in the building. Maybe the library. Maybe a bathroom.

Of the group of would-be teachers who watched the news from Columbine that day in April 1999, I am the only one still teaching.

When twenty first graders were slaughtered and the country responded without a national gun-buyback program, national red-flag laws, universal background checks, a national wait period, a gun registry, an assault-weapons ban, disarming all domestic abusers, ending legal immunity for gun manufacturers, instituting mandatory yearly classes for gun ownership (list all your ideas that could help here), we became complicit.

The argument against such measures is that criminals don’t abide by the law anyway.

Sixty-five percent of the guns used in mass shootings between 1982 and 2024 were bought legally. Sixty-five percent of mass shooters are following gun laws. If only 35 percent of mass shooters acquire their guns illegally, banning certain types of guns would decrease the risk to all of us. In fact, a study found that when an assault-weapons ban was in place between 1994 and 2004, deaths from mass shootings were 70 percent less likely to occur.

A member of the Texas legislature introduces a bill in 2023 that would offer kids as young as third graders lessons in administering first aid at schools’ required “bleeding-control stations.” Texas law already offers this training to students starting in seventh grade. The legislator wants younger kids to be able to provide emergency care to their teachers, classmates, and friends after a school shooting. She wants them to learn the techniques used to save lives on the battlefield.

Automatic, Belgian rattlesnake, blaster, blicky, boom stick, Brown Bess, burner, chopper, cuete, devil’s paintbrush, Diablo, fire-stick, Fireball, .45, gat, ghost load, hardware, heat, Hitler’s buzzsaw, jammy, lemon squeezer, leng, MAC-10, Ma Deuce, Nina Ross, nine, Peacemaker, Persuader, piece, pocket rocket, point-blank, rod, roscoe, six-shooter, Snake Charmer, strapped, tommy gun, toolie, trapdoor, wonder nine.

My classroom is in a barrack that sits outside the main school building. It’s a rectangular box made of tan aluminum. Shooters don’t even need to enter my room. Just spray an automatic weapon back and forth a few times from the outside, allowing the bullets to pierce the thin metal, the drywall, flesh.

When I was growing up in rural Colorado, guns were everywhere. In people’s pickups, cars, basements, entryways, gun racks, gun safes. I watched my brother shoot clay pigeons in the yard: the disks spinning from the trap, getting torn apart by the force of the pellets’ impact. I walked with my father through stubble cornfields, looking for pheasant. I watched him lift the gun to his shoulder, squeeze the trigger. I shot at targets a handful of times, after my father gave me a few instructions. His first lesson: “Never aim a gun at a person.”

My brother-in-law is a collector. He has a safe with an AR-10, an AR-15, a Remington 700 bolt-action, and a Colt 1911, among others. I have shot handguns with him at the rifle range. I have felt the heft of a firearm in my hand as I aimed at a coffee can, experienced the satisfaction of knocking it down. I understand how someone who feels powerless might crave dominance, how someone who feels fragile might long to feel control.

My brother-in-law stopped hunting with a gun and switched to a bow and arrow. He says with the scopes and ranges of modern rifles, it’s not fair to the deer.

After every school shooting, someone suggests arming teachers with guns. I’m not sure the teacher who loses her keys every week or the teacher who is on an anger-

management plan would be the right choice to carry a gun. Besides, where would the gun be stored? In the teacher’s desk? I don’t bring anything into the classroom I don’t expect to be stolen. Candy, books, DVDs, and markers go missing all the time, and those hardly have the street value of a gun. Would the teacher wear a holster? Does no one think of the throngs of students pressed against one another in the narrow hallways between periods? How easy would it be for a kid with deft fingers to lift the gun, or for a few students to overpower the teacher and grab it?

They suggest principals should have guns. This is the first year I would be OK with that suggestion. My principal is a former US Marine who served two tours in Afghanistan. He is stoic and methodical. He is the only administrator I’ve ever worked with who I feel would be capable of using a weapon wisely.

One morning when I arrive at school, the place seems empty. Only a few dozen students mingle in front of the building, waiting for the first bell. I walk to my barrack wondering if I’ve forgotten about a religious holiday. When I open my school email account, I see a message from the principal saying that the threat to the school has been investigated and is not credible. I have only a handful of students in each class all day. They were either unaware of the threat, like I was, or showed up knowing what we all know: the threat is always there.

The last time a school fire caused ten or more deaths was in 1958. Yet, for almost twenty-five years, I’ve practiced a fire drill every month. We’ve begun having more frequent active shooter drills only in the past few years. In our first trainings we were told to turn off the lights and hide in corners away from the door. Now we use another system, called ALICE: We are to be Alert to our surroundings: a suspicious package, a visitor with no visitor badge, an agitated student. During Lockdown we barricade our rooms, making it more difficult for the intruder to enter and for them to kill efficiently if the door is breached. But we now keep the lights on so police don’t have to search for light switches while sweeping the building. We’re supposed to Inform the authorities of the intruder’s presence. If the intruder gets into our room, we Counter by throwing anything we have at them: books, staplers, chairs, glue bottles, glitter. We no longer have to wait for the principal’s OK to Evacuate. Teachers can assess a situation and leave with students whenever they want.

The chain-link fence installed by the school district has one large gate secured with a padlock. During an active shooter drill, the teacher in charge of the key can’t get the lock open. The key will not go in. More and more students arrive at the gate. The mass of huddled bodies multiplies. I think of the slope of the hill, the angle of a shooter. I think of an automatic weapon. How little skill a shooter would need to maim and kill. How many kids could be murdered in the seconds that are passing. Finally a twist, and the lock pops apart. The teacher swings open the gate. Students rush to the field like sheep released from their pen into a meadow.

After the school shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, a teacher is accused of leaving a side door open. Officials blame her for the deaths of nineteen students and two teachers. She is later vindicated when authorities discover the door was shut and just failed to lock automatically.

They blamed a mass shooting on a teacher and a faulty side door.

Read that again.

The eighteen-year-old who committed that shooting used an AR-15-type rifle, which fires bullets with such speed that they demolish organs and bones. The bullets tumble around rather than passing straight through the body. The first responders were not prepared for what they saw, nor were they prepared to tell some parents they would only be able to identify their children by their shoes.

Hold out your hand. Look at its length from wrist to fingertip, its width from index finger to pinkie. Now imagine how a six-year-old’s shoe would fit right on top.

I live in the US, where I can be killed by a weapon meant for war anywhere I go.

A congressional representative from Georgia wears an AR-15 lapel pin, passes them out to others like United States flag pins. Says he does this to remind people of how important the Second Amendment is in preserving our liberties.

A six-year-old shoots his teacher with a gun. The bullet goes through her hand and into her chest. She still assists the other students to safety. She lives.

The news reports say authorities are checking to see if the parents properly stored the gun that the child used. Six-year-olds should be finding coins between couch cushions or stretching their hands into cookie jars for a treat. If a six-year-old has access to a gun, how could it have been stored properly?

I remind my students often, “If you see something, say something. It’s OK to be wrong, but how will you live with yourself if you were right and remained silent?” That kind of silence will slowly eat at the lining of your stomach, will cost you in years of bad dreams. I tell them, “You’ll know something before the adults do. You’ll see it in social media posts, in an open backpack. You’ll hear the comments a student makes under their breath. We’re relying on you to keep us all safe.”

Listening to each word, their eleven-year-old faces stare back at me.

Dana Salvador