Another Shooting, Like the Last One, Like the Next One

It’s not cynicism. It’s practical realism.

The worst part about witnessing a tragic aberrant historical event is when you realize there’s nothing aberrant about it at all.

I was 23 years old and working 4 p.m.-midnight shifts at The Sporting News in April 1999 when I came in on a Tuesday and found everyone in the newsroom standing up and staring at the televisions. The news had just broken that there had been a shooting at a high school in suburban Denver. The screens were showing students sprinting through the parking lot and a kid trying to climb out of a window. It was shocking to see, or even to think about, the idea of someone walking into a high school, a high school, and randomly shooting at teenagers. It didn’t really compute, the way something you’ve never seen before doesn’t compute — a skyscraper collapsing, the space shuttle exploding, Times Square abandoned of human beings. You stare at it to try to make sense of it. But what you’re really doing is adjusting to a new reality. You now live in a world where this can happen. Which means you live in a world where it can happen again. And will.