“Are you gonna shoot us up? Are we next?”
I didn’t grow up in gun culture. I didn’t live in a place where kids played sanctioned hooky on the first day of hunting season. No one I knew had a gun safe in their house, a rack on their car.
Yet, we were all obsessed with guns, for a time.
It was the late 1990s, and school shootings were one of the biggest stories of the day. Jonesboro was the first one I remember. A child pulled a fire alarm, then shot his classmates when they gathered outside.
Columbine followed, and with it, the media craze around misfits, outcasts, and outsiders. Suddenly, I wasn’t just, “bullied,” or “the strange one.”
I was a misfit. I was an at-risk youth. A gasping fish with no way back to the river. The adults suddenly had names for me that hadn’t existed before, and the kids followed suit.
In the wake of Columbine, kids followed me through the halls of my middle school and interspersed their laughing and taunting with shouts of “Are we next? You gonna shoot us up?”
The principal was worried enough that she started inviting me to sit in her office at lunch. I almost wasn’t allowed to attend an overnight field trip because of safety concerns. With the…
