Wracked by emotion, students attending the STEM school vigil plead, “What happened at STEM is awful, but it’s not a statistic.”
Tragically, awfully, in the long-term another set of statistics is exactly what STEM will become.
Students were right to condemn the immediate, mechanical call for gun control at their vigil. Politicians and special interest groups on both sides of the debate have become so accustomed to mass shootings that they have developed playbooks for real-time responses.
Those playbooks often leave little time for actual human emotion, fear, mourning and grief.
Soon — too soon — time will march on, tears will dry and STEM will recede into the ocean of American school shootings. It will become one more counting stat for news media. That is the moment we are all now trapped in, a country where the sheer number of mass shootings allows for statistical comparisons and analysis.
