I was in sixth grade when it happened. I was on a school bus with my classmates, headed for a spring trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico. At a midday lunch stop in a dusty restaurant somewhere between here and there, they had a little television mounted behind the counter. Long before the advent of smartphones, that small TV became our window into horror: images of Columbine High School, soaked in blood and saturated with tragedy, rolled across the screen.
My house was 15 minutes from Columbine in the south Denver suburbs. I had walked those halls, playing hide-and-seek with my friends when we lost interest in the high school basketball games our dads had dragged us to. And now, in that anonymous roadside diner, I watched those same hallways turned into a crime scene. My young, innocent mind could not process what I was seeing — and I know I wasn’t alone.
That moment was more than shocking. It was a beginning: a moment when violence pierced not just my childhood but the collective American consciousness.
Make no mistake, violence is not new to this land. Our nation was born amid bloodshed: wars, forced removals, lynchings, the brutal institution of slavery. But until the acceleration of technology in recent decades, much of that violence could be held at arms’ length — in distant battlefields, in short snippets on the nightly news, in spaces we deemed “other.”
Over time, though, we have let violence seep into our living rooms, our schools, our churches, and perhaps most distressingly, our minds — into the very fabric of our ordinary lives. And now, we have arrived at a moment of reckoning: an era in which we no longer recoil from violence but, in staggering numbers, consider it a possible means to an end.
From mediated fiction to everyday reality
Our cultural journey toward this normalization of violence began in fiction. As the latter decades of the 20th century faded into the new millennium, relatively young (and widely popular) art forms like movies and video games matured — growing darker, more visceral and more graphic in the process.
But even as increasingly vivid depictions of violence that would have once been reserved for the bloodiest of battlefields became part of our media diet, they still felt a step removed from our everyday lives. After all, they weren’t real, right?
But slowly and surely, technology brought us into constant contact with even more very real violence. Thanks to the insatiable appetite of the newly minted 24-hour news cycle, war, conflict and atrocity became media spectacles.
Cable news networks delivered a stream of live footage from the front lines of global conflicts. Little by little, the boundary between fiction and fact dissolved with each exposure — but still, these unthinkable acts were all taking place in distant lands.
Columbine was the crack in the dam. All at once, the bloodshed was no longer just happening “over there” — it was happening right here and it was very, very real. Immediately, the term “school shooting” entered our daily vocabulary for the first time, and what had once seemed an unimaginable violation became a tragically recurring scenario.
Each year since, more students, more teachers, more communities have been forced to reckon not just with the threat of violence but with its reality. According to the Rockefeller Institute of Effective Government, the United States experienced a record-high 16 mass shootings in 1999 — the year the Columbine massacre occurred. Since then, the U.S. has surpassed that number on 13 different occasions, with all of them coming since 2007. The wave of violence hit a new high in 2018 when America experienced 24 mass shootings in a single year. We’ve had 18 such events during just the first nine months of 2025.
We crossed the Rubicon at Sandy Hook
If Columbine represents the moment that violence sunk its teeth into our public consciousness, then Sandy Hook is the moment when we officially threw up our hands and accepted our fate. When 20 first graders and six educators were murdered in their own school building in that small Connecticut town, the nation collectively recoiled in horror — and rightly so.
But then, to our shame, we decided that we were powerless to prevent it from happening again. Despite the outpouring of public anguish over such an incomparable loss of innocent life, we found ourselves too paralyzed — or too polarized — to make any policy or cultural changes that might alter our dangerous trajectory.
Since Sandy Hook in 2012, we have seen Uvalde, Parkland, Marshall County, Santa Fe (Texas), and too many more to name. But it’s not just schools now. We’re increasingly seeing horrific acts of violence penetrate every corner of public life, fully erasing any barrier that may have once separated violence in fiction and violence in fact — if only in our minds.
Nowhere has this expansion of violence been more jarring than in our holiest spaces. Long viewed as a refuge from the world, it has become increasingly clear in recent years that our churches, synagogues, mosques and other religious sanctuaries are no longer sacred havens from savagery.
Just last month, a gunman crashed his truck into a Latter-day Saint chapel in Grand Blanc Township, Michigan, opened fire on worshippers, and set the building ablaze. Four innocent souls died.
This atrocity served as a disconcerting echo of previous attacks on houses of prayer, such as Charleston’s Mother Emanuel AME church in 2015, Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, and the Annunciation Catholic Church in Minnesota earlier this year.
And yet, with each passing violation, we pay a little less attention and move on a little more quickly. The attack in Grand Blanc garnered scant coverage in national media, and exited the news cycle almost entirely within 48 hours.
Lives lost, families shattered, a community in mourning — and yet we scroll on. This is desensitization in action.
The clearest evidence: Embracing violence as a tool
If we needed a final, damning piece of evidence that we have crossed into moral numbness, we got it earlier this month. A recent PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll — taken in the aftermath of the graphic public assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk — reports that 30% of Americans now believe that “Americans may have to resort to violence” to set the country back on course, with an alarming 42% of Gen Z respondents endorsing the same idea.
That’s not a fringe minority — that’s a generation. That’s not seeing violence as a catastrophic rupture; it’s seeing it as a possible instrument.
This poll confirms what many have felt but few have loudly named: We no longer universally perceive violence as a grievous intrusion. Increasingly, many view it as a response — a lever to push when politics fails.
Our moral baseline has shifted. Where once violence was unthinkable, now a sizable minority considers it permissible. That shift is the ultimate evidence of a society that has fallen fully through the looking glass — and found something very dark inside ourselves on the other side.
Reclaiming our humanity
It’s not too late to alter this trajectory, to collectively pull ourselves back to the side of our better, gentler angels. But the path ahead demands more than numbed rage or fleeting gestures. We must rehumanize. We must rebuild our moral muscle.
In journalism and social media, we must resist sensationalism and avoid turning violence into spectacle.
In classrooms, we must teach empathy and understanding — to inoculate children against the impulse to see others as objects instead of human beings.
In public policy, we must push for common sense laws that will make it harder to access weapons designed for mass death and easier to access treatment for the myriad mental health issues plaguing the American populace.
And in our communities — in school hallways, church basements, neighborhoods wracked by loss — we must show up for each other. We must mourn with those who mourn, advocate for those whose voices can no longer be heard, and refuse to treat more blood as the inevitable wallpaper of modernity.
None of these moves is a silver bullet. But each is a statement: that violence is never normative, and never neutral.
I think back to that diner in the middle of nowhere in 1999 — to the stunned face in the television’s light — and I see more than my own shock. I see the start of a battle for our nation’s very soul.
Let this generation — and those who follow — choose not to surrender to the spectacle, not to settle for numbness, not to slip idly into submission.
Let us reaffirm our capacity to recoil, to care, to demand better. Let us view these dark days not as a reason for surrender, but as an opportunity for awakening — as the moment when we say again: Violence is not a tool. It is a wound.
And we must choose each other instead.