The Struggle to Overcome Mass-Shooting Cynicism

At first, the footage offers a perspective we’ve seldom seen: an inside-the-classroom view of high-school students trying to evade an active shooter. Kids crouch below their desks and strategize in hushed tones. The lights are off. Fearing that the voice on the other side of the door is that of a killer, they flee. Then, as teenagers push open a window and thrust themselves to safety, the scene starts to look familiar.

The video from Oxford High School on Tuesday afternoon evoked the April 20, 1999, Columbine massacre with eerie symmetry. Twenty-two years ago, such events were deemed “unthinkable.” Columbine yielded wall-to-wall news coverage in a way that this week’s Michigan shooting, and many others over the past two decades, have not. Even the ones that register as more than a blip eventually fade from