Late last night, I was watching news coverage of yet another horrific shooting in the United States. But what struck me wasn’t the familiar “BREAKING NEWS” banner. It wasn’t even the grim resignation that now accompanies every American mass shooting.
It was the face of a young woman speaking from her dorm room at Brown University, 19-year-old Zoe Wisemann, currently in lockdown. This is the second time she has lived through a school shooting. At twelve years old, she survived Parkland. And at nineteen, she is now surviving this.
As she spoke, I felt my own stomach twist, because what she said out loud is exactly what millions feel and what I have felt for years: she’s sad, yes, but right now, she’s angry. Furious that in the seven years since Parkland, nothing of meaning has changed. Furious that Congress has done nothing to reduce the violence or the risk. Furious that a generation of students is now collecting trauma the way they collect course credits.
And I echoed her, word for word. I’m angry too. Because here is the horrible, staggering truth. The statistical likelihood of anyone experiencing one school shooting should be zero. Zero. That should be the floor, the ceiling, and everything in between. Instead, we are now watching teenagers and young adults survive multiples, before they’re even old enough to legally order a drink in the United States.
Zoe is clearly bright and resilient, attending one of the most prestigious universities in the world. And none of that has protected her. No campus, no zip code, no GPA shields a student from a political system that has decided that guns matter more than human beings.
Before anyone trots out the tired talking points, mental health, pandemic isolation, social media, video games, cultural decay, let’s be realistic. Every single one of those conditions exists in Canada, in the UK, in Australia, in Germany, in Sweden, and across the entire Western world.
And of course, we all know what comes next, the ritual chorus of thoughts and prayers. Well, have at ’er with the thoughts and prayers. I will always assume those are a given. But thoughts and prayers are supposed to be the starting point, not the entire response. What matters is what comes after. And in the United States, “after” has become a blank space. A void and a shrug. A refusal to take even one step that would actually make a difference. That is what Zoe is angry about, and that is what I am angry about too.
The common denominator is guns. Are there mental health issues elsewhere? Of course. Do young people struggle everywhere? Yes. Does society feel strained everywhere? Absolutely. But only one country has decided that the “right” to a weapon outweighs the right of a child to survive a school day.
And here is the piece I hate to admit. In those first few seconds after the alert broke, I caught myself thinking, “Please don’t let this become fodder for the current government.” Because we all know how this works. Before anyone even absorbs the human cost, the political machine starts spinning. The question becomes not why is this happening but which side benefits from the narrative. And whether the extremism comes from the right or the left, the human tragedy gets buried under the political tug of war. The horror becomes background noise while everyone fights over who gets the last word. And that, too, is part of the sickness.
And yes, last night was supposed to be a night where I wasn’t writing about the United States at all. I already had a Canadian-focused political post ready but that can be for tomorrow morning. Some realities are too big, too raw, too completely unacceptable to pretend they didn’t happen.
Because the truth is this. No one is safe when the places that should be safe aren’t safe at all. Schools., universities, grocery stores, concerts, parades, malls nor places of worship.
And once again, like after every shooting, every mass event, every moment of national grief, the real question isn’t what happened. We know what happened.
The real question is where the hell is Congress? Where is the leadership? Where is the courage? Where is the willingness to do anything other than protect the gun lobby and their own titles?
Because whether the national conversation is about the Epstein files, or tariffs, or fentanyl, or Caribbean interdictions, or school shootings, or anything else that touches actual lives, the theme is always the same. Power first. Country second. People last. Every day, every hour and every crisis.
And last night, listening to a young woman who has now lived through two school shootings before the age of twenty, the weight of that reality hit me harder than usual. I’m sad. Yes. But like Zoe Wisemann, I’m mostly angry. And if America’s so called leaders refuse to take meaningful action, then maybe the young people who keep surviving these nightmares will be the ones who finally force the change the “adults in charge” never had the courage to make. Because nothing changes until someone decides enough is enough. And last night, a 19-year-old student reminded the world she reached that point a long, long time ago.
Nancy's Notes 