The content of this essay includes references to gun violence and a school shooting. Until now, it had never crossed my mind to write about the trauma that I’ve carried with me. The unending hurt, shock, and frustration I feel every time I remember the lives that were lost blocks from where I would sit and study after class. How for weeks afterward, a stray bullet hole seemed to stare at me from the window of my favorite coffee shop as I cycled home. How thousands came together to mourn and weep and try to comprehend how hate could overrule the love we thought we had cultivated in our college community. After nine years, I’m still not sure how to talk about this event has affected me. Memorial Day Weekend should bring the promise of summertime fun, longer days, and ideally, a three-day weekend. And yet every year, around Memorial Day Weekend I am reminded of the tragedy that took place at my school. Up until now I haven’t been ready to write about what happened and the reasons that prevent me from articulating why I am still so upset, years later. After a lot of reflection and working hard to absorb everything that has happened to the world over the last year alone, I have realized there will never be a perfect time to vocalize my feelings. There is no such thing as the day that I suddenly wake up and am both equipped and qualified to articulate my thoughts on what transpired. Writing about what happened in Isla Vista on May 23rd, 2014, whether or not I am ready, will simply be another one of the many steps that take me further from grief and closer toward action. Here’s how I remember that night. I was 19 years old and in my first year of college. It was Memorial Day Weekend, and my friends and I had plans to go out and have fun on the Friday night of a long weekend. Homework could wait, and we walked out to the graduate student housing for a large group game hosted by the social club we were in. At first when a friend mentioned offhand that there had been gunshots fired in our community, I thought he was making some kind of sick joke. And then the news began flooding in: there was a police chase going on, the shooter was moving through the neighborhood in a car, and sirens began to scream past the building we were in. I don’t care to remember the shooter’s name. I know it and wish I didn’t. I can’t imagine harboring so much hate in my heart. I can’t imagine the privilege of him saying out loud that he was going to murder people, and that when the police evaluated his mental state (and determined he was of sound mind) that he was allowed to go out and steal the lives of six young college students. Friends, brothers, sisters, daughters, sons, PEOPLE. Whenever I find myself in a discussion that turns to gun control or Second Amendment rights or school shootings, I shut down. It is impossible for me to separate the lives that were stolen far too young from whatever diluted congressional bill is currently being debated. And it’s made me realize there are just so few people who understand what the impact of a school shooting actually entails. There’s the event itself. The alarm, the fear, the uncertainty. We panicked about how to get back to our dorm rooms safely - but what’s the safest way to return home while navigating multiple ongoing crime scenes? Then I remember furiously calling, texting, finding friends and classmates and neighbors all trying to figure out who had died. Maybe by some terrible stroke of luck I was going to walk away from the shooting not knowing anyone who was killed. As I waited for the list of names to be released I wondered if everyone I knew survived. I lulled myself into a false sense of security: no one I know has died. I repeated it to myself. No one I know has died. Again and again until I believed it. And then suddenly the rug was ripped out from underneath me as I read the list of names. I knew her. She had lived across the hall from me all semester. We kept promising to catch up soon and our schedules never aligned. It was the type of glib promise friends make all the time, yet nine years later I still find myself fixated on how it was never fulfilled. 19 years was all she got. Her life was ripped away from her because toxic masculinity took and took and now she lives only through collective memory. The Westboro Baptist Church threatened to protest our school’s memorial. They started a hashtag: GodSentTheShooter. Members of that church were barred entry to campus but I think the damage to morale was already done. In the days after the shooting happened there were cameras and news crews all over our small community and campus. Rage filled me as I would walk by the crews shoving cameras into the faces of anyone who would talk to them. How dare they intrude on our mourning, I thought. How dare they ask anyone to speak about the horror that ripped through our community. As if one grieving 20 year old with a microphone shoved in their face has the capacity to speak on behalf of thousands. Nobody talks about how collective trauma can leave you feeling guilty by association. Like how I never felt that my reaction to the event was justified because it wasn’t me or my best friend who was killed. But how does one control their grief? How does one control the feeling of an overwhelming sense of loss? Loss of life and loss of peace shattered our community that night. Every year for the next three years that I attended UC Santa Barbara, there were threats of retribution that someone was going to come and finish the job of the shooter. And every Memorial Day Weekend since, I find myself struck by the time that has passed and I am once again transported to my teenage self, crying in the bathroom at my dorm, grateful to be alive but confused as to why someone would do such an awful and hateful thing. From that night on, the shooting was something that defined my university. The rest of that school year took place in the shadow of the shooting, with counseling services available to any student who needed it. But how could I, someone who really wasn’t even that affected by it, take up those resources for those who really needed them? Every incoming class after mine was already aware or made aware of the shooting, but we danced around the topic. The once-popular song, “Pumped Up Kicks,” sung from the perspective of a school shooter, stopped being played on the radio stations in the county. We only discussed who we knew or where we were the night it happened during candlelit vigils in the following years. When I graduated and moved away from Isla Vista, it wasn’t just the tragedy’s omnipresent physical reminders that were suddenly removed from my life, but context for who I had become. Once more the radio waves were flooded with a song about gunning down classmates, and it felt like the rest of the world had moved on, if it had ever paused in response to the shooting in the first place. I moved across the country to a state where concealed-carry guns are more common than not. And I started graduate school with a new cohort who knew nothing about the event that had shaped my community and the entirety of my undergraduate experience. I found myself forced to justify my opinions on gun control and gun safety and talk about the trauma and guilt of surviving a school shooting. All the while, school and mass shootings continued. So, no. School shootings don’t end the moment bullets stop flying. They live on in perpetuity — in physical expressions of grief. Vigils for the lives lost, murals painted on campus to honor our fellow students. There’s intangible reminders too. A fear that sticks with you, wakes you up in cold sweats in the middle of the night. Nine years later and I still weep when I think about that weekend for longer than a few moments. Nine years and I still feel like there’s a piece of me that was broken that night that will never ever heal. It is a darkness that bubbles up, an exposed wound that brushes against everything, and a brokenness I don’t think I can fix. I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if my friends and I had decided to go out a little earlier that night, whether we would have been in his path. I’m haunted by the knowledge that I was a woman walking alone down the streets of Isla Vista less than two hours before the shooting began. This fear is what drives me to feminism. The shooter was a man who identified as “involuntarily celibate” or incel for short. This term refers to a group of men who blame their inability to obtain a romantic and or sexual partner on women at large. Their culture is steeped in misogyny and has led to numerous acts of violence against women since the early 2000s. The violence that erupted in my community that night was a symptom of what happens when that misogyny is left to fester unchecked. Until death was on the line, I didn’t realize that just because I happen to be born a woman, I occupy a different playing field from my male peers. I represented something he hated - simply because I existed at all. Once I understood this, my life became framed in a new way. For the three years following the shooting, I walked home stiff-backed, alert, and fixated on each car that passed me a little too slowly, praying that it didn’t contain dark motives. The fear that other students will have to go through what I went through drives me towards demanding common sense gun control. I’m not naive enough to expect that we could demand no guns for civilians in the United States. But I fight for mass shootings to be harder to commit. I fight for all of the students who should feel that school is a sanctuary and not a potential graveyard. It’s incredibly hard to learn when you fear for your life; I don’t remember much of the end of my freshman year of college - classes or my life at home. And I am sick of justifying my political beliefs to people who see shootings as just another headline on the news - not something that levels their world. Moving to Miami was jarring if only because suddenly no one knew about my trauma. I even had friends who hadn’t heard of the event, and upon hearing about what happened offered sympathetic platitudes. Without the personal context of living through a school shooting, sympathy feels a lot like pity. And I don’t want to be pitied. I want everyone to be enraged. Like me. And I think that rage is what has compelled me to finally pick up a pen and share my story. I’m angry that in nine years nothing has changed. Because in the time it took me to write and edit this piece there were two mass shootings in Miami-Dade County where I reside. Over 30 people have been shot in the past 2 weeks for just going outside. While these aren’t school shootings, the violence and trauma created by these two events will affect the victims for years to come. As a side effect of wondering what the post-pandemic world would look like, I have decided to speak more honestly, and try to communicate about what is important to me. I’m tired of finding myself unable to talk about gun violence and common sense gun control. This year I find myself willing to take more risks, striving for personal goals, and saying what’s in my heart: I’m sick of reading news articles about school shootings. I want the lives stolen too soon returned. Barring that, I want not one more mass shooting. And above all I’m done hearing about “thoughts and prayers”. I have shouted myself hoarse over these last nine years. I have marched and petitioned and contacted my government representatives all to be told time and again that “thoughts and prayers” go out to the victims of this tragedy. I’m sick of thoughts and prayers. And I know I’m not alone. Although writing about my experience on the internet may not be the solution to gun violence, I wanted to share my story to show that there’s more to it than a sensational news story. Fuck thoughts and prayers. It’s past time for real change.
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AuthorBree Gibbs, here. I'm a recent Master's Grad just trying to share what it's like to be a trash scientist (for those who aren't in the know, I'm a marine biologist). Categories
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