Madeleine Connery is a junior at Brown University and lifelong resident of Shelburne.
At 4:05 p.m. on December 13, I received the text that every American student fears yet none predict. My 21-year-old roommate sent a message to our group chat
“guys I just ran out of the engineering building there were sounds like gunshots.”
Over the course of the next 17 hours, my life unraveled.
At 20 years old, I became a school shooting survivor, along with my 7,800 peers who hunkered down in libraries, behind desks and whiteboards, fearing for their lives in dark silence while helicopters swarmed and sirens wailed.
While I will wear this trauma for the rest of my life, politicians and citizens alike seem to have grown numb and weary of caring. The routine thoughts, prayers and empty promises of change churn and sputter out until the next mass shooting occurs. Until it becomes your child, your cousin, your neighbor, you.
My story is not unique, nor is it new. The event came on the eve of the 13th anniversary of the Sandy Hook shooting. Those 20 first-grade students would have grown up to be college juniors today – just like me. Instead, their dreams, goals and ambitions were squandered at the hands of a man with a semi-automatic rifle.
Since Sandy Hook, the gun death rate among children and teens has increased by 106%. More than 398,000 American students have experienced gun violence at school. In a 2022 study by the Johns Hopkins Institute for Gun Violence Solutions, guns were the leading cause of death among children and teens. Vermont is not immune. The gun death rate here has increased by 17% since 2014. How many more statistics must I drop for you to become angry? How many more must die for you to do something?
Growing up in Vermont, gunshots normally meant hunting season; they meant late foliage hikes or long autumn drives to my grandparents’ house. I remember my first lockdown drill: my kindergarten teacher explaining it as a very important game of hide-and-seek, as we huddled together behind the arts station shelves. News of school shootings flickered intermittently throughout my childhood, but they always felt faraway–something that happened somewhere else, to someone else.
I would like to sit here and say the event was unprecedented, a mere tragedy that we’d prevent if we could. But it wasn’t. My 14 hours of fearing for my life curled up under my desk were a brutal reminder of a pattern, a conflation of anarchy and freedom, liberty and injustice. I faced the undeniable truth that I grew up in a country that would pick death machines over children’s lives.
And what upsets me the second most – after the fact that two of my peers didn’t live to see the first Providence snow and eight more left a review session with bullets in their bodies – is that nobody is talking about solutions.
Don’t pray for me. Don’t pity me. Don’t send any condolences my way; send that message to your legislator. Find your anger. Tap in to your fear.
Because in 21st century America, none of us are safe in school. In the richest country in the world, we are killing our children with inaction. To my fellow Vermonters, I urge you all to email, call and pressure the House Judiciary Committee to consider a ban on semi-automatic assault rifles and to implement a common-sense concealed carry permit requirement. Ask House Judiciary Committee members to fight for H.381, S.131, H.264, H.200. Ask for more, because Vermont has the power to act where Congress has failed. Your thoughts and prayers won’t stop bullets, but laws can.
