September and the beginning of fall are traditionally thought of as “back to school” season. Whether students and their teachers have been in their classrooms for just a few days or a few weeks already, this is usually the time when routines start settling in, and school days return to familiar patterns. This year, the first week of September was disrupted by a terrible tragedy that has become its own all-too-familiar routine in our nation: headlines about another school shooting. The heartbreak this time was at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, where two 14-year-old students and two math teachers were killed by a 14-year-old student armed with an AR-15-style rifle.
In school districts across our country students now regularly prepare for moments like this, starting with “hiding practice” for the very youngest children in pre-K and kindergarten classrooms. When will all of our leaders — and not just some — agree we should protect children, not guns? The Washington Post, which keeps count of school shootings that have taken place since the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, reported on the trends it has found, including the disproportionate impact on students of color: “Almost all the deadliest assaults were committed by White gunmen, a reality that has left much of the public with the false impression that school shootings almost exclusively affect White students. Children of color, however, are far more likely to experience campus gun violence: more than twice as much for Hispanic students and over three times as much for Black students. At schools with majority Black student bodies, shooters typically target a specific person, limiting the number of people shot — and the subsequent media exposure.”
The Washington Post also reports the median age for a school shooter as 16, and notes children “are responsible for more than half the country’s school shootings — none of which would be possible if those children didn’t have access to firearms.” This now includes the 14-year-old shooter in Winder, who allegedly received the gun he used as a Christmas gift from his father. When we allow more guns than people in our nation, when gun violence is the leading cause of death for America’s young people, and when 14-year-olds are able to access weapons of war and then use them to kill their classmates and teachers, we are failing our children. These are not the lessons they should be taking into the new school year.
Even as we pray with renewed fervor for students’ safety, we must also pray again that, along with all of the new subjects they will study this year, children and young people will have adults in their lives who can help teach them what is of value in themselves and others. These are the lessons they need. Dr. Benjamin E. Mays, the great president of Morehouse College who shaped so many of my generation including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said: “I am disturbed, I am uneasy about men because we have no guarantee that when we train a man’s mind, we will train his heart; no guarantee that when we increase a man’s knowledge, we will increase his goodness.” I share once again a prayer for young people everywhere so that they will learn what really matters.
God, help us not to raise a new generation of children
with high intellectual quotients and low caring and compassion quotients;
with sharp competitive edges but dull cooperative instincts;
with highly developed computer skills but poorly developed consciences;
with a gigantic commitment to the big “I” but little sense of responsibility to the bigger “we”;
with mounds of disconnected information without a moral context to determine its worth;
with more and more knowledge and less and less imagination and appreciation for the magic of life that cannot be quantified or computerized;
and with more and more worldliness and less and less wonder and awe for the sacred and everyday miracles of life.
God, help us to raise children who care.