Guest Column by Colleen Harrison

Eleven years ago, a junior in high school, I went into school one late March morning and found classmates standing around sobbing. A classmate, Eric, had gone home and shot himself with a parent’s gun the afternoon before. I didn’t know him well, as I went to a very large school, but it was still a shock to the system.

Exactly three weeks later to the day, a different classmate, Meredith, shot herself one morning before school, also with a parent’s gun. She, I knew. We weren’t especially close, but we sometimes sat together during free class periods and would say hi in the hallways. Two of my closest friends, though, knew her better and were understandably distraught over what had happened.

My high school’s response was to put a few guidance counselors in the school library, and excuse students to go see them if they were upset. I found my two best friends there, sobbing, and had no idea what to do. I called my mom, and she came and got us out of school. The image of students standing around in the halls sobbing when my mom came to sign us out is something she still talks about.

“No one else was around. No teachers, no principals, no adults. Just kids crying their eyes out,” she has recounted when telling others about it.

Later that night, I came home from my part-time job to my parents waiting for me at the kitchen table. My boss at the time had a strict no-cellphone policy, so I left my phone at home. Between the house phone and my phone, my parents said there had been multiple calls from friends and parents worried about rumors of a Columbine-inspired school shooting the next day, which would have been the eighth anniversary of that massacre.

A few days before Meredith’s death, the Virginia Tech mass shooting took place, so rumors of a school shooting were taken even more seriously.

I wouldn’t be surprised if my high school set a record for lowest school attendance on April 20, 2007. My friends and I all stayed home, most of us camped out in the living room of my childhood home, trying to remember what it was like to just be teenagers again.

Our parents assumed the rumors were bogus, and they turned out to be nothing, but they weren’t about to send us to school if we felt like we were walking into trouble.

My dad wrote for an independent political publication at the time, and wrote a column about that week. It included the following:

“What have we done to our children? Have we ignored them and their needs so callously that they feel completely alienated and cast adrift in a sea of dysfunctional adults? Do they perceive violence as their only recourse? … (Have we) convinced them that when the going gets tough, the tough open fire? … Neither June and Ward Cleaver nor my parents had to deal with this.”

Eleven years have passed, and what, if anything, has changed? My dad died about a year and a half after writing that column, but I have a feeling he would have had some things to say about the all too many mass shootings that have followed in years since. My mom certainly has.

Do I have the answers? Of course not. Maybe we as a country need to address mental health and how it’s treated nationally. Maybe we need to figure out how to address bullying. Maybe we need to do something about the number and types of weapons available, and who they’re available to.

I don’t have all the answers, but we need to be able to have a civilized conversation about it. When the conversation turns into a debate, which then devolves into sides being drawn and each side calling the other names and spewing vitriol, nothing is going to get done, and nothing is going to change. It just produces more hate, and that helps no one.

The first step to solving a problem is admitting there is one, and I think we can all agree that America has a problem.

Colleen Harrison is a photojournalist with the Tribune and can be reached at colleen.harrison@albertleatribune.com. The views in this guest column are completely her own, and do not reflect the Tribune as a whole.