‘I just want to scream’: Parents across US aghast after another school shooting

Fabian Padilla and his wife spent part of Tuesday researching bulletproof gear for their kindergartener, scrolling through smiley-face backpacks with armored lining and kid-size hoodies designed to protect against gunfire.

It struck the Orlando father of two that the idea was “insane in -- supposedly -- a civilized country.” But the couple wasn’t sure what else to do. They were teary-eyed and shaken at the news there had been a mass shooting, another one, this time at an elementary school in Texas.

“As a parent, you feel helpless,” said Padilla, 35. “You feel like you and your children are at the mercy of whatever happens out there, and we have no control over it.”

He repeated the word once more: “helpless.”

Across the country, parents were raw with anger, despair and hopelessness after learning of the 19 children and two adults shot to death at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. They thought of the families hearing the worst possible news, the children who would never grow up, the shattering of so many lives.

And they thought especially of the number of times it had happened before.

School shootings have been on the rise in recent years, with data collected by The Washington Post showing a relatively consistent increase since 2016. There was one exception: 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic forced schools to move lessons online.

As students returned to their classrooms, the shootings resumed. There were 42 in 2021, the highest number recorded in more than 20 years. Twenty-four so far this year.

Overall, a person is twice as likely to be struck by lightning as they are to be shot in a classroom, said Jesus Villahermosa, who runs the security consulting firm Crisis Reality Training. But, he added, “the challenge is that the data are showing that we’re seeing an increase in these unlikely events and the death tolls are getting higher and higher.”

Kristin Ruthstrom, a mom in Kansas City, Mo., was six months postpartum with her first child when the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre flashed across her TV screen. “How could this happen here?” she remembers wondering as she sobbed at the horror.

But a decade of school shootings and two more children have changed the now 39-year-old’s outlook. The devastation from scenes like the Uvalde, Texas, shooting no longer shock, and sadness has been supplanted by rage.

Despite efforts to organize for change -- new political leaders, or common-sense gun control -- Ruthstrom said “it’s not moving the needle” against the power and influence of the gun lobby.

“I just want to scream,” she said. “That this is America in 2022, where we have all the resources possible for us, and we still continue to let this happen.”

[Loved ones remember the children and teachers killed in Texas school shooting]

[Guns killed more youngsters than cars for the first time in 2020]

To Marla Stout, 54, a mother and substitute teacher who also lives in Kansas City, Mo., moving out of the United States has started to seem like the answer.

She said her family has always nurtured a love of the country, underscored by its legacy of military service. But increasingly, she feels less at home in America. She and her husband have talked seriously about leaving.

“The only way I feel I can protect my kids right now is take them out of this country,” she said.

Some students -- especially the older ones -- were feeling on edge, too.

As he climbed out of his dad’s Subaru to head into his Stoughton, Wis., high school on Wednesday morning, 16-year-old Braylon Kane said with a mix cynicism and wariness: “I have to go be a target.”

His dad thought about it all day.

“It broke my heart because I never felt like a duck in a shooting gallery at school,” John Kane, 51, wrote in a Twitter post. “As parents we want give our kids better than we had, sadly today I realized I am failing.”

In a phone interview, he grew emotional discussing his belief that nothing would change. Even as a gun owner and a hunter whose kids have grown up shooting, he said, “It does really piss you off that we live in a country that loves its gun more than it loves our kids.”

Braylon Kane said the comment that had haunted his father all day was made in passing, but spoke to a frustration he feels with the lack of change. He’s not old enough to vote, but he already feels like most elected officials aren’t willing to listen or take action.

“I wish people were asking how much more of this needs to happen before we’re willing to change the laws,” he said. “How much more tragedy do we have to suffer before people are willing to give up their control over guns?”

For parents of younger children, there was the question of whether to tell them what had happened -- and if so, how.

Briana Volk kept her 5- and 8-year-old kids home from school on Wednesday. She just couldn’t imagine putting them on the bus. So she told them they were having “a fun vacation day.” And they did: she took them to lunch, ice cream and a toy store, where they got to spend their allowance. It was a beautiful day in their home city of Portland, Maine.

“I don’t think they’re at the age to know what’s happening,” said Volk, 40. “I don’t want to shatter it for them. If they bring it up in the coming days, I’m willing and ready to talk about it. But I hope they don’t have to just yet.”

Megan Carolan, 34, vice president of research at the nonprofit Institute for Child Success and a mother of two, said parents have to strike a balance between the need for precaution and the risk of traumatizing their kids. She had not told her 5-year-old about Texas. He bounced down the street to school Wednesday morning, so eager to see his friends that “I didn’t have time to hug him tight and remind him that I love him, because he was halfway across the schoolyard.”

She teared up as she thought about what the constant drumbeat of shootings is taking from childhood. A friend had told her something that seemed to illustrate the loss: during an active shooter drill, her daughter had had to learn how to turn off her light-up sneakers.

“The idea that something as pure and joyful as your light-up sneakers, that we have to consider it as a risk, as a threat - we’ve stolen something from their childhoods,” Carolan said. “And we’re not seeing grown-ups do enough to try to give it back to them.”

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The Washington Post’s Steven Rich contributed to this report.