Lori Falce: Stop telling me what won't work

Every single time I hear about a school shooting, I am back to that Friday in December 2012.

Around 10 a.m., I started making calls to area schools to get reactions to the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting. I was asking if the districts would be placing schools on lockdown or taking other precautions against copycats and if they were making recommendations for parents talking to their kids about the tragedy that blanketed the news.

After lunch, I had to take my 4-year-old son and change him into a clean shirt, put him in the car and drive him to the elementary where his preschool class met in the basement near the music room, down a kind of blind hallway.

We weren’t allowed to walk them to class after the first day. Instead, we had to line them up against the brick wall by the old school bell outside and wait for the teachers to lead them away.

I never want my son to know what I went through that day as I turned him over to other people, to walk through doors I could only see as shrapnel and down to a classroom that seemed like a shooting gallery. I smiled so he didn’t know I was afraid. I hope he didn’t know I was afraid.

On Tuesday, in my mind, I was outside that school again as the death toll for the Robb Elementary shooting in Uvalde, Texas, crept higher and higher. As I got the news that 19 children and two adults were dead, I was physically at a dinner with colleagues. In my heart, I was holding my baby’s hand as I kissed him on the head and told him to be good for Miss Reams.

Like so many other parents, I expressed my frustration on social media. How has this happened again? How is the response once more just thoughts and prayers and not answers and action?

The response was predictable on both sides. Blame. Finger-pointing. The same solutions that have been proposed since Columbine and Sandy Hook and Parkland, since Las Vegas and Orlando and Squirrel Hill and — just 11 days ago — Buffalo. And more days and cities and bloodbaths than can be counted.

Control the guns, says one side. There’s sense there because it’s hard to have a deadly shooting without a gun. Can you have a knifing? Franklin Regional is proof that yes, you can, but also proof that it will not be as deadly.

That won’t work, says the other side. It’s a mental health problem. It is undeniable that someone who takes a weapon and leaves 10-year-old children to be identified by DNA is unwell mentally. The left isn’t wrong when they say that is unfair to the millions of people who suffer from mental illness and don’t commit mass murder.

And so Uvalde will end exactly the way every other massacre that seemed like a tipping point has ended — with both sides saying what won’t work and no one finding an answer to what will.

I don’t want to end up standing outside that school again, my son’s hand clenched too tight in mine. I want to find an answer. I want to try to do something. I don’t want Beto O’Rourke interrupting a news conference while an angry man shouts him down. I want attempts instead of rhetoric.

Multiple covid-19 vaccines were discovered in less than a year from the first death to the first shot. At the same time, tests were found, as were treatments and protocols and therapeutics. Why? Because people agreed there was a problem, brainstormed ways to address it and tried anything they could to make a difference.

Mass violence in our schools and our grocery stores and our theaters and dance clubs and synagogues and churches is an epidemic, too. We need to address it the same way — through prevention and treatment and identification. That will never happen without working together and listening to each other.

Stop telling me what won’t work. Start telling me what might keep me from reliving every mother’s worst nightmare.