On this edition of Oregon On The Record, host Michael Dunne, Brooke Bumgardner and Julia Boboc of KLCC discuss how different generations experienced the scourge of school shootings over the years.
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Michael Dunne: Gun violence has become a common story in the US, and while the campus killing of conservative leader Charlie Kirk has dominated headlines, it wasn't alone. There were other deadly shootings that week, including one at Evergreen High School in Colorado. Gun violence has become a common topic of conversation among families, friends and co-workers, including here at KLCC. One aspect of the issue that has become clear is the different generational perspectives between those who came of age when such headlines were rare and those whose lives as adolescents and young parents have been shaped by the inescapable reality of active shooter drills and on the worst days deadly attacks. We wanted to share a conversation between colleagues of different generations that may sound like the ones you're having as well. Julia Boboc, a reporter with us here at KLCC, and Brooke Bumgarner, our Membership Director– Thanks to you both for coming in and chatting. So, you know, I'm in my late 50s. Brooke is in her early 40s. Julia is in her early 20s, and we've all had not necessarily personal experiences with school shootings, but just being in school at different eras where we've seen these kinds of horrific situations happen. I'm going to start with me, and then I'm going to kind of bring in the younger folks here in the studio. So I went to high school in the 80s, and I'm sure I don't have it exactly perfect, but there were very, very few school shootings when I was in high school, and it was not something that we really thought that much about. Now, Brooke, you went to high school 10, 20, years after me.
Brooke Bumgardner: I grew up in Texas for context, and I was actually a freshman in high school when the Columbine shooting happened. And it was completely unmooring as a student in high school; everyone I was with was devastated. It was a watershed moment, you know, and we're recording this on September 11, and I was a senior in high school when that happened. So I would say those two moments, kind of bookending my high school experience, were both watershed moments in our country and in how I perceived personal safety and in public settings.
Dunne: Okay, Julia, what about you? Fast forward another 20 years or so. When you were in high school, talk about your experience. By the time you were in high school, school shootings had become much more normalized, unfortunately.
Julia Boboc: It's also interesting. And I would like to double on this, on Brooke’s sentiment that I think it's super important to be having these conversations, especially today, but I think it's interesting to even start with the high school experience, because for me, school shootings were something that I was aware of in elementary school, and we were doing shooting drills in elementary school. I also grew up in Texas. I grew up in San Antonio, in sort of a more suburban kind of community, and so yeah, growing up, we had shooting drills. We had lockouts. We had lockdowns. We were, you know, doing the whole thing of, you know, getting in the closet, or getting down on the ground and sitting down and turning all the lights off, closing all the curtains, you know, all of that kind of stuff. And we were, like, seven, so it was just kind of there. Everybody knew that it could happen from a young age, but it felt good to have those drills, I will say that.
Dunne: That was going to be my next question. You know, going through them, of course, you're a kid. Anything can be, oh, it can be fun. It can be an opportunity just to kind of be with your friends. But I mean, was it fearful, or did you really feel like, “Oh, I'm glad we're doing this?”
Boboc: Yes, it was a lot of both. Obviously, it wasn't fun. I mean, even as a seven year old, you're kind of aware of what this is and the teachers tell you that. They say, you know, don't giggle. You're not supposed to make a sound. You're not supposed to do anything. And so it's very, very very clear that this is serious. Even if it's a drill, you're supposed to treat it as seriously as possible, the same way, you know with a fire drill, you're supposed to be on it and walk out in a line. So there was a little bit of both, but, but definitely knowing that those drills were happening and being prepared for them. And our teachers were always telling us, as long as you follow those things, you will be safe. So, so there was a sort of feeling of, I guess, security in having those.
Dunne: What about you, Brooke? Did you go through active shooter drills?
Bumgardner: No, I did not. But my son entered kindergarten last year, and he had a lockdown drill. We were notified in advance it would happen, and so that night, I was checking in with him afterwards, and I was very curious to hear what he would say. I tried to put my emotions and feelings aside and give him his room. He described the whole scenario to me, and he was very, very upset that some of his classmates had been whispering. And I don't know, I was kind of speechless then. I tell my son, we will never put you intentionally in a place that is unsafe, right? I tell him, as your parent, I do my best to keep you safe, and I can't help but wonder if I am knowingly lying to him. But I do think his school is safe. You know, they have very safe measures. The people there are safe. It's this whole specter of school shootings and gun violence everywhere we go that is what’s not safe. So it was interesting hearing his perspective and his experience. And for him, he's so very young, he doesn't even know what the true threat could be. I think it was just like an unsafe person maybe coming in doing explosions to him. It's not like, oh, there's something that used to happen now that doesn't happen anymore. This isn't change. He's awakening to this reality.
Dunne: Julia, doing those drills, especially at such a young age, did it normalize the idea that school shootings are quite possible? Did you take from the training this idea?
Boboc: Definitely, as I was getting older, maybe even in elementary school, sort of fourth and fifth grade. When you reach that age, there's also more talk, right? There are more conversations about this kind of stuff. And you're in that more enlightened age, where you are thinking critically about things like that, and so I think at that point there was definitely an understanding that school shootings happen, that they happen, not necessarily often, but they happen repeatedly.
Bumgardner: Julia, I'm curious about your experience. Did you and your peers size people up to see who might be a potential school shooter? Because that's exactly what happened after Columbine in my school.
Boboc: I actually do not think I ever considered it being a student, and that's most likely because of the distance of time between Columbine, because that was, you know, the biggest case of students in a school committing a school shooting, for the most part. What our understanding was is this was an external person coming in to hurt people.
Dunne: When I was in school, the idea of mental health challenges or somebody having, you know, a real issue that could, you know, become something extremely dangerous– We didn't think that way. First of all, mental health was something that was just private. You didn't talk about it to your best friends.. And so I'm curious to talk about the different generational aspects. What was it like, Brooke, kind of growing up sharing either fears, or mental health challenges? I mean, was that something that you could do?
Bumgardner: No way. I can't even imagine having a conversation like that. You know, I graduated from high school in 2002.
Boboc: High school was extremely different, and I do want to acknowledge that a huge part of that is probably because I was in Portland, Oregon, so a very different space. There was a lot more conversation. And around mental health, although it was almost oversaturated in the sense that this was sort of a time when mental health was becoming something that people were starting to talk about, and was kind of becoming something that people were starting to be aware of. They were starting to think about, oh, this is what I'm feeling, and this is what it means, and blah, blah, blah. And it kind of got to a point where everyone sort of felt like they had some sort of mental health issue, because we were all trying to figure ourselves out. And also, in high school, you're in your teens. Your hormones are going crazy. You're angry some days, you're really sad some days, and you're like, do I have depression? Like, probably not, you know, yeah. But there were conversations, for sure, between friends about things like that. Counselors were available, and mental health resources were a huge thing. But I don't know necessarily that it was really surrounding the type of mental health that contributes to school shootings. It really was more of that anxiety, depression, and also the end of my sophomore year was when covid hit. So then even more of the mental health conversations were coming around, just simply from the isolation and that also kind of, I guess, halted the school shooting possibilities because nobody was in school.
Dunne: We're talking about different generational responses to school shootings. We're talking to our own KLCC reporter, Julia Boboc, and we're talking with our membership director, Brooke Bumgardner. Brooke, as you mentioned before, you’re a parent. And so you now have to sort of experience this from two sides, as I do too, although my kids are certainly much older and they're adults now. But you know, what's it like when you send your child to school every day? Is it something that pops up instantaneously, like I could be sending him to a dangerous situation? Or is it like, you know, we know driving is dangerous, but we get in our cars anyway, and we're so used to it, we don't even think about it.
Bumgardner: I think about it every single day. And granted, I'm a person who might be a bit of an over thinker. So there is that, but it's on my mind every day. It's on my mind about, you know, whether or not something is going in someone's backpack that's coming to the school.
Dunne: I know you're not a parent, Julia, but I do wonder as you spent some time overseas: Give us an idea of that time. What did your peers say about their perception of the US?
Boboc: From the age of 11 to 13 I lived in Barcelona, Spain, so it was middle school. And it was an extreme culture shock. Obviously, just moving abroad and being in a different place is always a culture shock, but it was an extreme culture shock to see how people abroad perceive the United States and perceive people from the United States. I moved into 2015 and the next year was obviously the year that Trump was first elected. So there was a lot of stuff there, but there were, there were a ridiculous amount of jokes about, really, school shootings, really kind of directed towards me. And it was, it was just like, it takes you a back, because, like I said, growing up in a situation from a young age where you have to go through these drills, and you have to experience the fear of this situation happening, going to a different country, and if, if I got mad at a friend, they would say, “what are you gonna do? Are you gonna shoot me?” And it's like, you're 12, you know? Like, are you crazy? And it's so clear that that's coming from a place of, and I can't even believe, you know, I'm saying something like this, but it's coming from a place of privilege. You have the privilege of not fearing for this, you know, for the most part, and it's coming from a place of not understanding that this is a true possibility, and that people are living with this. And so it was really like it was, it was a characteristic of America. It was inherently and intertwined with being American, which is horrifying that that's what they chose to stick to, as well as racism, and things like that, sure. So it was, it was funny for them, and it was terrifying for me.
Dunne: Brooke, when you see news coverage of a school shooting, I'm curious, because, again, generationally speaking, I didn't have the same experiences that you both did. You know, to me it still feels kind of detached, I guess I'd say it's something like this, and I know so much has changed over the interviewing decades. But you know, when I grew up, awful things tended to happen in other places, i.e., bombs didn't go off at noon on a Thursday at a bank in Topeka, Kansas, they went off at, you know, 12 o'clock at a bank in Tel Aviv or something like that. Things didn't necessarily horribly happen in this country. I'm being overly simplistic, but, because of my worldview at such a young age, I still view it as a kind of detached experience, like that's still not something that could happen in my neck of the woods. But I want to hear from you, what do you feel like?
Bumgardner: Well, when I see news coverage or social media coverage, I used to think more about the experience of the students, and like, what they maybe felt, or, you know, what was going on, or what they had to do, because I don't even, I'm not fully up to date on what the processes are and the protocols, but, like, did they have their phones off? You know, I used to think about that, and now I think about the parents when my son was an infant. His daycare center was across the street from, you know, an active shooter situation, which ended up being like a BB gun. But I went to go home for lunch, and I would drive by his center, and it was blocked off by a police officer who said that there was an active shooter. And the panic I felt and the fear, and I tried to call, you know, the center. And of course, they were not picking up, because they're not supposed to, yeah, but I think he might have been about nine months old, and I thought this did not enter my mind when I became a parent, and how naive of me, because it's now on my mind every day. When he had his lockdown drill, he said that they took off their shoes so they could get where they needed to go. And I said, “Oh, no, no, please leave your shoes on. It's okay to leave your shoes on.” And then I had to, like, monitor what I was conveying to him in terms of anxiety, right? But I wanted him to leave his shoes on.
Dunne: Last question for each of you, and I'll go to Julie and then finish up with Brooke. Let's just imagine if some of those kids that you were in school with in Spain were here. What would you say to them about what America is like now?
Boboc: I would say that America is desensitized terrifyingly. I think it's really frustrating to think about, and I don't know that it's something that those kids from Barcelona would understand, just this idea of having something so violent and traumatizing happening so many times that you become completely numb to it when you hear about it happening and having to avoid, actually, actively avoid, thinking about it. And you know it's terrible, because when it happens and you hear about it in the news, you want to sit with it and acknowledge it. Judge the people who were affected by it, and why this is happening, and how horrible it is, but at the same time, it's so often that you just can't do that, you know, it's, it's terrible. It's really horrible.
Dunne: Brooke, I'll kind of tweak the question a little bit, given what you know and and given what your son’s already had to go through. Are you concerned that he'll grow up desensitized?
Bumgardner: Oh yes, I am very concerned that he and his peers, because it's, I almost feel like it school shootings or gun violence in general, has been normalized as an option to handle your issue, and I think there's not enough accountability for communities, families, etc, around teaching people how to handle their issue and and also just safeguarding our residents and our students and while I think there's a lack of accountability across all issues on this, and I don't know the solution for it, but I do worry that he's gonna think that we just live in this kind of world. And I remember a time at least, you know, and again, this kind of goes on that topic of privilege. I remember a time when I felt safe everywhere.
