Terror, but routine: Mansfield shows we’ve sadly learned to live with school shootings
Not again.
Not here.
Not us.
The moment news broke Wednesday morning of a shooting at Timberview High School, a Mansfield ISD school that’s in the city of Arlington, those troubling thoughts hit all at once. Your stomach flips, and fears of the worst overwhelm any effort to hope for the best.
Questions of “why, why, WHY must this happen?” compete with prayers that it’s not too bad, that the wounded survive, that the injuries are minor.
The toll, mercifully, was limited: two students shot, another with unspecified injuries and an adult with minor injuries that didn’t require treatment. Police declared that the shooting followed a fight. So, there was some small solace in the fairly quick determination that this wasn’t a planned act of terror committed by a deranged student armed to the teeth and intent on taking as many victims as possible.
There was also an eerie calm that betrays how deeply these acts of violence have embedded themselves in our lives. Students were calmly posting on social media. Police executed search and evacuation plans designed in advance. School officials activated plans to move students and unite them with their parents.
It’s all so depressingly routine.
Timberview is like so many large, suburban high schools — a sprawling campus with nearly 1,900 students, a diverse population, good state accountability ratings and a strong graduation rate. It could have been any of hundreds of schools in Dallas-Fort Worth.
In the days to come, we’ll no doubt have all the debates that come with these tragedies: mental health troubles, the effect of social media and, of course, gun control. Right now, we must be careful not to jump to conclusions.
But if the early reports are accurate, we must also discuss ways to prevent young men from channeling anger into violence.
We’ve known that the COVID-19 pandemic has significantly harmed many young people’s emotions and mental health. Whatever role that played in Wednesday’s events, we must all do better to help young people deal with life’s challenges without descending into rage.
We must support the Timberview parents and students who may feel trauma and fear long after the terror they experienced Wednesday.
And we must reflect on the ways we’ve let this become familiar and redouble our efforts to prevent the next horrible school shooting.
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Editorials are the positions of the Editorial Board, which serves as the Fort Worth Star-Telegram’s institutional voice. The members of the board are: Cynthia M. Allen, columnist; Steve Coffman, editor and president; Bud Kennedy, columnist; Ryan J. Rusak, opinion editor; and Nicole Russell, editorial writer and columnist. Most editorials are written by Rusak or Russell. Editorials are unsigned because they represent the board’s consensus positions, not the views of individual writers.
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This story was originally published October 6, 2021 at 1:04 PM.