Editor’s Note: CNN analyst Juliette Kayyem is the author of the best-seller, “Security Mom: An Unclassified Guide to Protecting Our Homeland and Your Home.” She is a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School, a former assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security in the Obama administration, host of the national security podcast, “The SCIF,” and founder of Kayyem Solutions, a security consulting firm. The opinions expressed in this commentary are hers.
It was a slightly lazy afternoon. I had had a busy week at work and hadn’t managed to get the kids Valentine’s cards. I had left for work early and hadn’t seen them and so I thought I’d run to the store quickly, pick up the dog from her “daycare,” and meet the kids at home.
I was turning onto my street, with the dog on the passenger side, when the familiar phone number came through on my cell phone. It’s a number from CNN in New York City; it’s a number that those of us who are security analysts for CNN know all too well. It means something happened.
I’m so sick of this.
The call came in at 3:08pm. I was on air, from my home, by 3:14. Like clockwork, we were all on air playing our roles, saying the familiar words – once again. A shooting at a school, a known assailant; fear, terror; parents searching for their kids; a gun, that AR-15 –again and again and again. Then the signs – so many signs – that the shooter left over time; signs along a trail leading to his deadly destruction. The TV anchors asked us questions, and we “experts” gave the same analysis. Again.
I’m so sick of this.
We like to state, as Americans, that we are exceptional. And we are. The numbers prove it. Read this: America’s unyielding plague of gun violence
No other nation suffers as we do because of school shootings; no other nation except ours has these kinds of mass murders; no other nation, with polling showing tremendous support for gun control laws, ignores popular sentiment so successfully at the behest of special interests, like the National Rifle Association – the NRA. No other nation fails its children so spectacularly.
I’m so sick of this.
One by one, my own kids come home, I can see them from my office studio walking up the driveway to the back door. They got my text that I was on Skype from home for CNN. They are familiar with this pattern.
Two attend the local high school down the street, at a crowded noisy intersection in the great Eastern city where I live. They’ve done the active shooter drills; as a parent, I’ve gotten the test alerts. I don’t mind it all, actually – it seems better than leaving the kids unprepared. I am a “security mom” after all.
They walk in, aware of the news. My oldest says “another school shooting. This one in Florida.” And that’s it; another one – a commentary not on our lack of sympathy but just on the overwhelming familiarity of it all.
It’s disgustingly, terrifyingly, heartbreakingly familiar. We – all of us – have to make it stop. I’m so sick of this.
Aren’t you?