When a School Shooting Hits Home - No. 201

Nashville sadly joins the list.

Getty Images.

SPRING BIRTHDAY SEASON HAS ARRIVED, and as much as I had planned to write about strawberry birthday cake today, I can’t bear to turn on the oven.

Minutes away from my home yesterday morning, three 9-year old schoolchildren and three adults who worked at the school were gunned down by a 28-year-old shooter armed with two assault rifles and a pistol. To gain access to the school, situated on top of a quiet green hill in Nashville, the assailant shot out the front doors and stepped through.

Down the hill from the Covenant School is the neighborhood’s fire station. When the shooting began, one kindergarten teacher is said to have escaped with her class into the woods where she led the children straight to the station.

The ‘’it’’ city and my beloved hometown, Nashville is bursting at the seams with development and tourism. But yesterday it made a list no one wants to be on—the setting of a school mass shooting. It is grieving for Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs, William Kinney, Cynthia Peak, Mike Hill, Katherine Koonce, the head of school, and its loss of innocence.

Covenant School, Nashville. Getty Images.

On March 13, 1996 in the small town of Dunblane, Scotland, west of Edinburgh, a gunman entered Dunblane Elementary School, killing 16 children and a teacher.

It was about the time I was baking Rose Levy Beranbaum’s yellow birthday cake from The Cake Bible and frosting it with strawberry icing for my older daughter’s sixth birthday. My younger daughter wasn’t yet two. I hadn’t yet written the Cake Mix Doctor. It seems like another lifetime ago.

The United Kingdom reacted swiftly by enacting tight gun control legislation. Residents of Dunblane initiated a Snowdrop Campaign (named for the spring flower in bloom at the time of the shooting) to change British gun laws. Within the year, Parliament passed a law banning private ownership of handguns above .22 caliber, which was shortly afterwards extended to all handguns. And in 27 years, there have been no more school shootings in the U.K.

Meanwhile, in America, so far 130 have died as a result of mass shootings this year. Gun violence is the number one killer of children and teens today, overtaking automobile deaths. And in this space, just 10 months ago, I wrote about the Uvalde tragedy.

I never dreamed a shooting would hit so close to home.

My children are grown, but my granddaughter is just beginning preschool in Florida. I had just spent the week with her. When the school shooting news broke, I was driving home and approaching Atlanta. By Cartersville, more details emerged. By Chattanooga, I realized I wasn’t baking a strawberry cake for you today. Instead, I’d make an attempt with this newsletter.

But with so many shootings before Nashville, it’s hard not to get pessimistic.

Sadly, to date, proposals to reinstate a ban on assault weapons and require universal background checks lack the votes in the Republican-controlled U.S. House.

Just in Tennessee, this is how our political leaders have reacted to gun violence, according to the watchdog publication, the Tennessee Holler:

• U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn has amassed $1.3 million in National Rifle Association (NRA) contributions. (And I know she is a grandmother, too. So what gives?)

• State Senator Kerry Roberts (Springfield, TN) attributes gun deaths to ‘’TV, movies, video games.’’ Right…

• Gun advocate, Andy Ogles, a controversial U.S. Congressman for the district in which Covenant School is located, sent this family Christmas card in 2021:

Instagram - The Tennessee Holler.

And should I remind you about our drag shows and banned books? Gov. Bill Lee seems to feel it’s his job to save our children from the devil’s work.

Just you wait. They will turn this conversation into one about mental health and gender when it’s really about guns.

What Nashville learned firsthand yesterday is that school shootings are not normal and no parent should ever have to think otherwise.

Thanks for letting me vent.

- xo, Anne