On Sept. 11, I picked up The Daily Campus and saw the front page — the first segment was an article on the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. The second was a professor’s thoughts and opinions following the shooting at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis on Aug. 27. This is messed up, right? I don’t mean the fact that The Daily Campus is reporting on the matter — that aspect is completely normal and expected. But it is messed up that on a given day in September of 2025, the two biggest stories of the day are about horrific gun deaths. The year is 2025, the youth are literally dying in their classrooms and as an anonymous peer told me in Whitney Dining Hall this morning, “I wasn’t even phased.”
The latter article about the school shooting isn’t even the most recent of the year. That title belongs to Evergreen High School in Colorado, where a student walked into class with a handgun, shot two of his peers and then himself at 12:30 p.m. This marks the 47th school shooting of the year.
I’m beyond confused.
Why do we live in a place where it’s normal to read about three shootings in one day? It is genuinely baffling.
In theory, we (as a society) should be living in the time of the most empathy. In no other time in history have human beings been able to connect with virtually anyone, anywhere. In the contemporary era, it is unfathomably easy to access advice and care. Despite having so much potential empathy, in society today, a simple gesture of kindness is often deemed as “woke” or “performative.” The not-so-late and not-so-great Logan Paul summed this up perfectly in the (and I can’t believe I’m writing about this) Paul American influencer show. In a moment we’ve all moved on from as a society way too quickly, he stated, “I don’t want to come across like a woke asshole, but like, dude, women have it hard. Women have it fucking hard. And I empathize with them.” The man fears so much that having empathy will get him “cancelled” that he has to preface he’s not making an attempt to “be woke.” Huh? What is the point of the youth preaching love, wellbeing and togetherness if we fear what the words we say mean?
It certainly wasn’t always like this. I live only a town over from Newtown, Conn., and I can vividly remember my own mother crying when 20 kids were shot 40 minutes from my own house. My six-year-old eyes watched cars line up for church, watched the somber faces of masses and watched my family engross themselves in wondering how the nation should act and react. For my parents, it felt like Newtown was just like Columbine, a horrific school shooting that occurred in 1999. Columbine and Newtown were mental scars on the nation. It seems to me no one cares about such acts of violence today.
I can hop on Instagram Reels right now (no, I’m not downloading TikTok) and watch somebody get run over by a car on my little doomscroll device. It’s so common, in fact, that I have a peer who calls the app “my little car crash app.” I’ll watch perhaps the most heinous footage of my life in 480 pixels and shrug it off. Why? With the rise of social media and the quick and easy ability to post anything you want, we have curated and crafted a violent culture. Humans love to post atrocities today; that’s what draws in the most shock value. That’s what gets the most likes and hearts. It is a feedback loop: people see horrendous death over and over, and in due time they just don’t care anymore.
Where does this put us as a society now? We are in a very scary spot. If America fails to bat an eye at a school shooting today when 20 years ago, we mourned it, our empathy in the not-so-distant future is shaping up to be nonexistent. Like all the Reels and TikToks, society has allowed school shootings, political violence and unwarranted death to become so normalized that it is hard to believe any change to solve the myriad issues will actually occur. Does it not already feel like we have fallen into this mentality where truly awful events happen and the vast majority of people just say, “so it goes?”
Today it is so effortless to overlook and ignore tragedy, but it is vital to society to remember that it is our decisions that determine how empathetic and caring the next wave of Earth’s inhabitants will be.
Steven Patrick Morrissey, former frontman of The Smiths, once said, “It’s so easy to laugh, it’s so easy to hate / It takes guts to be gentle and kind.” If, starting today, we seek out the empathy that is at our disposal, a land where shootings and death are normalized does not need to exist.
“This marks the 47th school shooting of the year.” Source?