The tragedy of school shootings extends far beyond the death toll — as horrific as those figures are — and includes hundreds of wounded and many, many more who suffer mental and emotional scars for years to come. More than 300,000 American children have been in school during a shooting since the 1999 mass shooting at Columbine, according to the Washington Post’s John Woodrow Cox.

In a sobering in-depth article titled “What school shootings do to the kids who survive them, from Sandy Hook to Uvalde,” Cox interviewed multiple children and their families about the aftermath of school shootings, including a 10-year-old boy in Uvalde who was too numb to cry and worried about having lost his glasses in the chaos that day, a now-40-year-old school counselor who survived Columbine but is still dealing with PTSD, and a group of high school senior girls who have suffered anxiety and panic attacks since the shooting when they were students at Sandy Hook Elementary.

“The children and adults who die in school shootings dominate headlines and consume the public’s attention,” wrote Cox, and the “[b]ody counts become synonymous with each event, dictating where they rank in the catalogue of these singularly American horrors: 10 at Santa Fe High, 13 at Columbine High, 17 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, 26 at Sandy Hook Elementary. And now, added to the list is 21 at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Tex.”

“Those tallies, however, do not begin to capture the true scope of this epidemic in the United States, where hundreds of thousands of children’s lives have been profoundly changed by school shootings,” Cox continued, including “the children who suffer no physical wounds at all, but are still haunted for years by what they saw or heard or lost.”

Cox and several of his Washington Post colleagues have compiled a database on school shootings, and according to their research, at least 185 students and adults have been injured in shootings at schools and another 369 injured. In total, with their calculations beginning with the 1999 Columbine shooting, more than 311,000 children have been present at 331 K-12 schools when a shooting has occurred. (Note: the database sought to include all incidents where a gun was fired on campus, from the mass shootings that make national headlines to the smaller incidents where a gun was fired only once.)

Cox appeared on MSNBC’s Alex Witts Reports on Sunday to discuss his Post articles and research findings from his book, Children Under Fire: An American Crisis.

Anchor Alex Witt noted that there had been 42 acts of gun violence in American schools in 2021, the highest since 1999, despite the months that schools were still closed due to the pandemic.

Gun sales had spiked during the pandemic, Cox noted, with more homes having guns that didn’t have them before, and many were not storing them properly.

“There are millions of children in this country who live in homes where there are loaded and unlocked weapons in dresser drawers, and in some cases just lying around,” he said, and many of these same children “are dealing with very heightened levels of stress, depression, anxiety because of the isolation.”

“The media tends to focus solely on the children that are killed in school shootings,” said Witt, and mentioned that his article “puts a spotlight on the children who survive.”

“Some of these kids suffer no physical wounds, but they are still profoundly haunted for years, by what they saw or what they heard and what they have lost,” she said, and asked Cox for his thoughts.

He replied that his work has focused on this subject for the past five years, concurring that the real toll of these shootings should be viewed as including the “hundreds of thousands of children who deal with the consequences of school shootings for a long time.”

The effects on these children can include panic attacks, fear of overly loud noises, having trouble making new friends after losing someone, survivor’s guilt, trouble sleeping, self-harm, anxiety, depression, and “debilitating PTSD,” said Cox.

Cox shared with Witt his experiences interviewing survivors of school shootings, like 10-year-old Noah Orona, lying in a hospital bed after the Uvalde shooting with a badly wounded shoulder, worrying about losing his glasses and going back to school.

These conversations were “awful,” Cox said, and that was what inspired the creation of the database.

Orona “represents something that is so much larger,” he continued. “I saw a lot of kids just like Noah, who are dealing with guilt, who are dealing with nightmares, who couldn’t sleep at night, who couldn’t sleep alone, who couldn’t function any more.”

“And I thought, how many kids does this represent?” Cox concluded. “And what we now know, it’s over 300,000 children who have been in a school when a shooting occurred, since Columbine. And we’re just allowing it to continue. We’re not doing anything differently than we were when this all began. And it’s unfathomable.”

Watch the video above, via MSNBC.

The post ‘Profoundly Haunted’: More Than 300,000 Children Have Been in School During a Shooting Since Columbine first appeared on Mediaite.

from Mediaite https://ift.tt/fsBcVry