CNN
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A generation of kids who grew up haunted by the fear of school massacres can’t outgrow their trauma: It’s also stalking their carefree college days.
America’s latest mass shooting, until the inevitable next one, wrote a new community in the roll call of colleges stigmatized by tragedy. To Virginia Tech, Northern Illinois and the University of Virginia, add Michigan State University.
Footage showed students fleeing for their lives. Tales emerged of individuals smashing windows to save classmates from a gunman. Students blockaded themselves in dorms, built barricades in the library, cowered in restrooms, or just ran for their lives after their cellphones buzzed with a “shots fired” warning from the university police force.
More horror, in yet another city, in the cycle of sudden death that can strike anyone, anywhere. With macabre irony, the shootings at Michigan State on Monday night, which killed three students and injured five more, took place on the eve of the fifth anniversary of the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on Valentine’s Day 2018. Tuesday was also the 15th anniversary of a mass shooting that left five students dead at Northern Illinois University.
The day brought the familiar futile anger over the tortured politics of gun control and splits among Americans about firearms that mean that – even after more senseless deaths – nothing will be done.
Any mass shooting is horrific. But whenever young lives are cut off before they’ve barely begun, the tragedy is especially aching.
Parents who send their kids off to college fret about whether their sons or daughters will fit in, will struggle with academics, could stumble because of alcohol or drugs. Now, they must also worry about mass shootings. Can a nation that can’t guarantee its kids are safe at school now not keep them safe at college?
“They are terrified, their parents are terrified,” Michigan Democratic Rep. Elissa Slotkin told CNN on Tuesday after meeting survivors and family members from Michigan State, which is in her district. “It’s terrorizing and we either do something about something that is terrorizing our population, or we don’t care about it.”
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel told CNN that when she dropped her kids off at…
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