On September 8, a girl was shot in the hip at the local high school in the town I grew up in. The shooter passed away shortly after from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
The shooter was a fourteen-year-old girl, who by all accounts was a good student, not that her grades matter. It’s her age, the utter lack of maliciousness in her description, that makes this event so devastating in a way that is new compared to other high-profile school shootings that have happened in the country. By no means do I intend or wish to discredit the intensely traumatizing and painful experiences that other school shootings have inflicted, but I do want to point out that the shooting that happened in Alpine this week was not a mass shooting, or a premeditated killing spree, or even a murder. A child went to school with a gun, injured a fellow student, and then killed herself. Now, our community must find solidarity in the grief and fear that recent events have caused in what I used to think was the safest place in the world.
When a community is feeling what Alpine is feeling now, it’s difficult to look inward at how this could have been prevented, especially when it has to do with the community’s own flaws. The girl who was injured, her family, and the rest of those affected all need the kind of community support that Alpine is so ready to offer, but so does the family whose daughter took own life this week. That a girl was suffering deeply enough to bring a gun to school, shoot someone, and commit suicide calls for deep introspection as a community. We have failed this girl. We have failed to understand that she was suffering. We have failed to bring her the health resources she needed. We have failed to hear her voice, or silence, or pain until what happened this week felt like her only option. Alpine has always felt like the safest place in the world to me. This week has proven that while it feels safe and secure, Alpine is not perfect and is not offering the necessary resources to its people.
I remember being fourteen. I was fourteen only four years ago. When thinking about what my life was like at fourteen, I’ve always remembered it fondly yet somewhat dismissed it, because I can feel the ways I’ve grown since then. Now, after what happened in Alpine, I remember it viscerally. I remember the tenderness of being fourteen in a way that you can only see in retrospect. I didn’t know when I was fourteen that I would look back on myself and see so much. I remember how incredibly sprawled out the future felt, and how small things felt like big things, and how my unjaded optimism was protected by the way my life was turning out. I know that my fourteen isn’t everyone’s fourteen, and it certainly wasn’t hers. But at the core of it is still the tenderness and vulnerability and vast, unknowable future that comes with being so young and at the same time approaching the precipice of the rest of your life. I think of that when I think of her and I feel that tenderness and a visceral need to protect it. I want to change what it was like for her. I want her fourteen to not have been lost. I want Alpine to have been better for her. I want it to mean to her what it means to me now, and for everyone else who knows what it is to live there.
There are some who won’t be surprised that this happened. It is Texas, after all, and we’re known for being intensely anti-gun control. I want everyone who sees this to know that by no means does this represent everyone, and that this shouldn’t be reduced to something that was inevitable. It was not. It was preventable. So don’t say that it was “Because #Texas.” It hurts enough to feel something so intense and painful be made political. I know this will take its place among many other good reasons that there should be much, much better gun control and gun safety in this country. But it will also take its place in many people’s hearts as a painful and sad memory that has nothing to do with politics or being right.
I am hurting for the girl that was shot this week, and I am hurting for her family. She is in stable condition and was able to go home within a couple days.
I am hurting for the officer who was shot amid the confusion. He’s in stable condition as well.
I am heartbroken over the high school freshman who took her own life this week, and heartbroken for her family.
I am hurting for my town and all those affected by what happened there. I wish nothing but healing and positive change for the future.