BY MARTIN KICH

Yesterday, teachers, parents, and students across Colorado were spared any sort of repeat of the Columbine massacre, but as the anniversary of that horrible tragedy approaches, they, and all of us, were reminded of just how vulnerable our schools remain.

Indeed, the same can be said about the vulnerability of most of our churches and synagogues, our meeting places, our malls and other retailers, our movie theaters and restaurants and other venues for leisure and recreation, our government buildings and our public spaces, and just about any locations in which sizable numbers of people gather without giving much if any thought to the possibility that simply by being, they are placing their lives and perhaps their loved ones’ lives in mortal danger.

Despite much effort to improve the security of specific locations–and nowhere been that effort been more intensive or apparent than at Columbine–we have not addressed the fundamental issue that unhinged individuals continue to have access to high-powered and high-capacity weapons that can end and damage dozens of lives in just a very few, terrible moments.

The continuing vulnerability of our children is especially painful. And even for those children who never directly experience gun violence at their schools, their awareness of the possibility of such violence is fundamentally changing their sense of personal security, their ability to learn, and their attitudes toward the broader world. It is fundamentally changing their conception of what it means to be American.

Without Columbine, one might even ask what possibilities might have, perhaps, seemed more viable to Sol Pais, the very troubled young woman who had fixated on the massacre and ended up taking her own life so far from her home. Even granting that there is an endless variety of terrible things on which a disturbed mind might fixate, we seem to be perpetuating the dark mythology of terrible events that have a particular resonance for young people who are struggling with significant psychological issues.

We are, in effect, holding ourselves hostage—and allowing our children to be held hostage—to the notion that a civil and safe society requires everyone to be armed. Never mind that every statistical study suggests otherwise. Never mind that we have never been more vulnerable to this sort of mass murder than we are now. Never mind that every previous instance in which the technology of weaponry has required adjustments to our gun laws, we have made such adjustments because we have valued actual human lives over ideological talking points. Never mind that as the number of massacres increases, the percentage of Americans who are gun owners keeps decreasing and the numbers of guns owned by a very small percentage of gun owners keeps increasing.

It should be apparent that I do not wish to trivialize any of these issues.

On any other day than yesterday—or on any day on which there had not been some sort of mass shooting—the following news item would have been peculiar.

But, on a day such as yesterday, it seemed something beyond peculiar. It seemed ironic on more levels than I am able to articulate—and thereby serves, I think, to illustrate that all irony is not damaging to the public discourse:

The discovery of a wayward raccoon inside a Cincinnati elementary school has prompted the building’s temporary closure.

The raccoon was discovered early Wednesday inside South Avondale Elementary school. Cincinnati schools spokeswoman Lauren Worley says students and staff finished the day at another school and were given Thursday off “out of an abundance of caution.”

It remained on the loose Wednesday night.

Plans call for euthanizing the raccoon once it’s caught to prevent it from returning.

School officials are unsure how it got into the building.

The quoted story is from the website of Fox45News in Cincinnati.

The initial headline on the story as reported on the Cincinnati Enquirer’s website was “Raccoon-on-the-Loose Prompts School Closure.” I actually laughed out loud when I read it.

But if you felt, as I did, even a momentary pang at the thought that the raccoon would be euthanized, consider the ironies in how that honest, personal emotion contrasts to the relative lack of any meaningful legislative response to Columbine, Sandy Hook, and Parkland—and the blur of “lesser” tragedies in between and those, inconceivably, still to come.