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Arnie Bernstein's avatar

When I was teaching at Triton College, one morning a student came in wearing a red Northern Illinois University sweatshirt and dark glasses. The day before a gunman opened fire in a lecture hall, killing five and then shooting himself. I said “are you in camaraderie?” She said “I lost two friends yesterday.” She was shaking. I took her into the hallway and she collapsed in my arms, sobbing in sheer agony. Holding onto a 19-year-old who’s friends were murdered is something I’ll never forget--and hope I never have to do again. I don’t know what happened to her all these years later, but I always think of her with each recurring one of these things. I was close to finishing my book on the Bath School bombing at the time. This young woman showed me the face of 1927 Bath. I told her that she now had a duty, just as the survivors of the Bath killing. Remember and bear witness. Tell the stories of her murdered friends. I seem to be rambling here, but writing about mass murder always reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut’s ending of Slaughterhouse-5: Poo-tee-weet.

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Dennis Martin Brooks's avatar

I left teaching long before the commencement of school shootings. Now I watch in horror and dismay lines of school children linked hand-in-hand as they are escorted from a crime scene, people who had only gone out to buy a loaf of bread at a local supermarket standing frightened and/or mourning , movie-goers cowering at mall entrances wondering if the next time they go to see a film, it will be their last. They do not know. They do not understand. They try. But many cannot any longer.

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