Early Friday morning, Devon S. Johnson, a former Emory University professor now living in Newtown, Conn., went to his child’s middle school to drop something off when a random, yet terrifying, thought entered his head.
“When I went, I rung the bell, and it flashed through your mind,” said Johnson, who lived in Atlanta until 2004, before eventually settling in Newtown. “These kids are vulnerable.”
A few hours later, Johnson sat helplessly in a local Starbucks while he and his neighbors fielded emails, phone calls and text messages about a massive shooting at the local elementary school.
“It was unfolding in front of us,” said Johnson, whose two children do not attend the school although they live two miles away and are in the same district. “It gives you chills.”
As terrifying as Friday’s shooting was — where 6 adults and 20 children were gunned down at the school before the killer committed suicide — it didn’t happen in a vacuum. This year has been particularly bloody in cases of seemingly random shootings at places often considered safe.
In July, 12 people were killed at a movie theater in Colorado during a midnight premiere of “The Dark Knight Rises.”
Less than a month later, six people worshipping in a Sikh temple in Wisconsin are gunned down.
Last week, two people were killed while shopping in an Oregon mall.
Now, at least 27 people, including 20 children, killed in a Connecticut elementary school.
A movie theater. A place of worship. A mall. And now a school.
“This is an American tragedy,” said Robert Friedmann, director of the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange at the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University.
Friedmann added that in most of the cases, the motivation is rarely ideological.
“Unfortunately, for too many people, they have some kind of internal conflict — a quarrel, a grievance, a complaining, a fight, fired from their jobs — so to me, it doesn’t matter how sane or insane they are,” Friedmann said. “It is not a psychological issue, it is a social phenomenon, where people take the law into their own hands and people get killed. We are at a disadvantage because it is difficult to control individual urges to take a grievance out on someone else.”
Friedmann said while there will be a lot of anxiety about personal safety after the shootings, people will continue to go on about their business, although true healing could take months, if at all.
“It will be somewhere in the back of our minds,” Friedmann said. “It is a frightening experience. This is as close to it as it comes on stranger-on-stranger crime. Even though the statistical chances of getting hurt are not too high, people have a reason to be concerned.”
Community activist Suzanne Guy Mitchell, a native of Washington, D.C., said she always maintains an air of cautiousness wherever she goes, especially when she is with her children.
She said after the Friday shootings, she immediately spoke with the leaders of the Atlanta Neighborhood Charter School, where her 5-year-old twins David and Sloan attend, and asked that they review all of their security procedures.
“I feel for the families in this tragedy and it just breaks my heart,” said Mitchell, the president of the neighborhood association for Summerhill, near downtown.
Deborah McCloud did everything she could to stop herself from rushing to her daughter’s Decatur school to pick her up after hearing about the school shootings. She did call the school, however, and asked that her daughter, Avalonia, call her back. “Just to ease my thoughts.”
“It feels as though no place is safe. We can’t go to places that are normally designated as safe havens anymore without looking over our shoulders,” McCloud said. “However, that should not stop us from living. If we do that, we give in to the violence and craziness. I don’t plan on changing anything other than living each day to the fullest. At this point that is the only thing we can do.”
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