NASHVILLE: When Elizabeth Barese picked up her 11-year-old son from school on Monday (Mar 27), she knew she had to tell him that a shooting had happened the same day at the school neighbouring their family home in Nashville.
“We’re right next door and there was a police presence,” the 47-year-old told AFP. “I had to address it right away with him.”
Standing in front of the crosses erected outside the entrance to The Covenant School bearing the names of the six victims, three of them young children, Barese said: “It’s not a conversation you want to have with your kids.”
“It’s a delicate balance of being honest with your kids and not scaring them.”
The same dilemma is being faced by countless American parents in the face of yet another school shooting to rock the country, leaving them needing to comfort their children, all the while reeling from their own anguish and fear.
Gun violence is a constant in the United States, a country of about 330 million people awash with more than 400 million guns.
Schools have not been spared, with assaults on educational institutions strikingly common.
Since the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, there have been 376 school shootings across the country, according to data gathered by The Washington Post, with 199 people killed and 424 injured. All told, the data shows more than 348,000 students exposed to gun violence at their school.
For US parents, those growing numbers mean a persistent worry that their children’s school could be next.
A 2022 Pew Research Center survey found that roughly a third of parents of school-aged children said they were “very or extremely” worried.
After the shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, that left 21 people dead, Barese said she wrote a post on social media reading, “I don’t know when the next one is going to happen but I hope to God it’s not Nashville.”
“But I know there’s going to be another one.”
“WHY DID KIDS GET KILLED?”
Xsavier Cleary, who lives about 30 miles (50km) from the Covenant elementary school, came to pay his respects with his own kids’ safety on his mind.
“We just wonder now, are our kids still safe in schools?” he said.
On Monday, he said his children, aged from three to 22, could not escape talk of the shooting, in which a 28-year-old heavily armed shooter broke into the small private Christian school and killed six people – three staff members and three students.
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