On January 6th, 2017, another mass shooting occurred at the Fort Lauderdale Airport in Florida, which resulted in the death of 5 people and a dozens of injuries. On January 7th, while my brother and I were watching TV in the living room my mother approached us asking if we had heard about what just happened. When we asked what she was referring to she responded with the details on the Fort Lauderdale airport shooting, and we told her that we had already heard about it. My mother than asked us “It’s sad, right?” She was then thrown off guard when we both responded nonchalantly with “Yeah.” I could tell she had expected us to give a more ‘appropriate’ answer, one that showed how saddened and disheartened we were over the recent events. The things is our one word answer showed just that. When she asked us if we felt anything at all I replied with “Yeah, it’s sad, but it’s not really a surprise anymore; I mean there’s practically a different mass shooting every month.” I think it was after I said that that I really started to think about my relationship with mass shootings.
Now before you start jumping the gun, no pun intended, no, this article is not going to be about gun rights and restrictions, although that may be in another article eventually. Like I said, this article is mainly on my views on mass shootings and how they have been morphed over time as a result of mass shootings. Now according to the Washington Post, federal statutes describe a ‘mass killing’ as an event resulting in the death of 3 or more individuals, regardless of the weapon. Therefore a mass shooting would follow those guidelines with the exception that the weapon in use would be a firearm.
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Sadly this has become a very common occurrence. Common enough that I felt practically indifferent about the events that occurred in Fort Lauderdale. I think the most disturbing thing is that I feel indifferent because of the fact that it has practically become normalized. I’ve tried to think of a time where mass shootings didn’t seem so common or actually took me by surprise and I think that might’ve been the Aurora Movie Theater shooting that happened in 2012. Which was almost five years ago, for the last five years there have been so many incidents that I am no longer phased by any of them. I’m from Connecticut, Sandy Hook happened an hour away from, one of my teachers had a niece who was at that school, and even then I didn’t react ‘properly’. Don’t get me wrong, Sandy Hook hit hard, but when I saw how shaken other students were I couldn’t help wonder why I wasn’t like that. Have I really grown accustomed to mass shootings or have I just become apathetic with some strange delusion that it’ll make them stop? I don’t really know for sure, and that’s the scariest part to me, I have never been involved in any mass shooting, hopefully I never will, but they have all stuck with me in some way.
