I was old enough in 1999 to remember everything about what I experienced on April 20, 1999, but I was not old enough to understand hardly any of it, and there was much about the Columbine shootings that, despite things like being best friends with the daughter of the chief of police of Littleton at the time, being taken to the memorials every year I remained in Littleton afterward, attending the protest gathering of the NRA rally they decided to hold in Denver ten days after the shootings, and knowing two of the Columbine victims, I didn’t learn or really understand the implications until recently (as in, more than two decades after the shooting). Provoked by the shooting in Buffalo followed quickly by the shooting in Texas, my friend and I were discussing what it’s like to be so close to a famous true-crime incident and how it colors the way you think forever, in ways you don’t realize until decades later.
![no thoughts head empty no thoughts head empty](https://ih1.redbubble.net/image.1147418277.1429/raf,750x1000,075,t,fafafa:ca443f4786.jpg)
I am from Littleton, Colorado-everyone I’ve ever talked to after 1999 knows what I’m going to say next-where the Columbine High School shooting happened I was less than ten minutes away in middle school and I didn’t realize until 20 years later that my peers and I were the first kids to experience the school lockdown. The friend I was having lunch with the day of the Tulsa shooting was in Oklahoma City when the bombing happened in 1995, close enough to feel every floor of the federal building collapse. One might argue that thoughts like the ones I was having are quite morbid, and that would be part of the reason I’m writing this. An hour after I got home, I heard the news of the Tulsa shooting. The reason I’d bet on it is that, on the day of the shooting at a hospital in Tulsa, Oklahoma earlier this month, which was perpetrated by a man who’d been released from surgery the day of the Uvalde shooting in Texas, I was sitting with a friend at a restaurant thinking to myself that Oklahoma hadn’t had a shooting in quite a while that I know of and, running down the list of places mass shootings have happened, I didn’t think we’d had a shooting at a hospital. I won’t go over the growing list of most recent mass shootings in America, likely because, by the time I think I’m done, there will be another one.
![no thoughts head empty no thoughts head empty](https://i.etsystatic.com/13061263/r/il/255878/3067621784/il_fullxfull.3067621784_qt0o.jpg)
While this post doesn’t directly address gun laws, it’s about another topic related to mass violence: the increasing demand by the public for “expanded access” to “mental health services” as a way to stop mass shootings. SCOTUS ruled yesterday to continue the expansion of gun rights exactly one month after the Uvalde shooting that claimed 19 lives, most of them elementary school students.
![no thoughts head empty no thoughts head empty](https://res.cloudinary.com/teepublic/image/private/s--lDvt35qO--/t_Resized%20Artwork/c_crop,x_10,y_10/c_fit,h_435/c_crop,g_north_west,h_544,w_409,x_-69,y_-56/g_north_west,u_upload:v1561483906:production:blanks:nvgy11lefnvjtfxu6kaw,x_-497,y_-403/b_rgb:eeeeee/c_limit,f_auto,h_630,q_90,w_630/v1594810505/production/designs/12223843_0.jpg)
In the 23 years since the Columbine High School massacre, the school shooting in an affluent, formerly unknown suburb of Denver, Colorado (my hometown) that put school shootings on the map, gun laws have become looser and looser despite victims’ efforts for stricter laws.