A sobering footnote to Monday’s mass shooting at Michigan State University is not about the three dead victims but rather some of the survivors — including a college student who, 10 years ago, was among the children who lived through the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Connecticut that took the lives of her 20 classmates.
“I am 21 years old and this is the second mass shooting that I have now lived through,” Michigan State senior Jackie Matthews says in a short posted video. As The New York Times reports, she's one of at least two survivors of the Michigan campus rampage who had already lived through an earlier school shooting. That chilling new trend should stand as a blistering condemnation of America’s wanton failure to protect its children.
Not 50 days into 2023, the attack marked the year’s 67th mass shooting. It came five years almost to the day after the Feb. 14, 2018, high school mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, that left 17 dead. At that time, an astounding 187,000 American children had experienced a school shooting since 1999, according to The Washington Post. Today, that figure stands at an unimaginable 338,000 kids — more than St. Louis' entire population.
