It's Not About the Sentence, It's How We Prevent the Next Parkland | Opinion

I wasn't alive in 1999 for Columbine. When 20 first-graders, and six adults, were killed at Sandy Hook, I was 10 years old. The Parkland shooting happened in February of my sophomore year of high school in 2018. That could have been me, I remember thinking.

Four years later, the Parkland shooter has been sentenced to life without parole. There's been much controversy over whether he should've gotten the death penalty instead, but I think that debate is best saved for the families of the 17 people killed and the survivors. To me, the verdict was a reminder of how inherently reactive our society is to gun violence—and how almost nothing has changed over my 20 years of life.

Indeed, I've always lived under the bloody shadow of school shootings, fortunate enough to have yet been spared while at least 185 others have not. Reminders of gun violence are everywhere in the United States and go far beyond victims' shattered bones and pierced organs. The psychological wounds extend from post-traumatic stress and depression among survivors to the fear and anxiety among those who've only indirectly experienced these shootings. For most students, gun violence is never more than a thought away, with active shooter drills for even the youngest children, teaching them how to run and where to hide. Even when there isn't violence, threats shape our lives.

In my California high school, when I was a student, there was a graffitied message in the boys' restroom: "I'm counting my bullets, I'm loading my clips. Don't come to school tomorrow." Attendance was optional the rest of the week, but I was terrified for months thereafter.

There are no easy answers to school shootings, and that's partly because the American political quagmire has made inaction the primary recourse to tragedy. Even though acts of violence should be met with comprehensive gun reform, vapid rhetoric usually fills the void instead, with systemic school shootings explained away by individual factors. Mental illness contributes to only 4 percent of all violence, and less so for gun violence, but it's become the regular scapegoat, including in the Parkland trial. As the underinvestment and defunding of mental health care make clear, these are hypocritical deflections of the real issues at hand.

The passage of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the first major firearm safety legislation in 30 years, obviously gives me hope, but calling it progress is overstating the bill. "Red Flag" laws, which have been implemented in Florida to stop dangerous individuals from possessing or purchasing firearms, have only been incentivized across the United States, not mandated. Universal background checks, which are supported by 88 percent of Americans, were left out. And a federal assault weapons ban, like the one in place between 1994 to 2004, is still laughingly impossible. The 2nd Amendment stands tall, and we're dying from our freedom.

In the New Yorker, pediatrician Rachel Pearson wrote about her experience waiting for the victims of the Uvalde school shooting who never arrived. "A Level 1 trauma center can do nothing for children whose bodies are so destroyed by bullets," Pearson said. "We kept wishing to help them, even as it became clear that they were already dead."

I think of our courts similarly. Some justice was served to Parkland on Thursday, but it will never bring back the innocents savagely slaughtered. Justice is a privilege wholly out of reach to the dead.

Have no doubt, school shootings are a preventable disease. They must not be accepted as inevitable; our laws, our values, and our imaginations can yet be changed, our hearts moved.

Simar Bajaj is a student at Harvard University and a research fellow at Stanford University School of Medicine. He is a contributor to the Washington Post, Guardian, Smithsonian Magazine, and Undark. Follow him on Twitter @SimarSBajaj.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.