When I studied abroad a man was shot and killed a few metres from where I stood
I should have gone to barthelona
When I studied abroad a man was shot and killed a few metres from where I stood.
I’d ended up in the United States for my study abroad placement because I’d handed in my preference sheet late. Everyone had wanted to go to Chile it seemed, so I was allocated to a new partnership destination, Puerto Rico, a small island in the Caribbean that is an “unincorporated U.S. territory”.
Growing up in London, the violence du jour was knife crime. On sweaty August days in the 2000s and when wars in the middle east must have tired news coverage, I remember headlines like the “summer of stabbings”. The national media’s favourite pick me up always seemed to be chronicling the “anti-social behaviour” amongst working class teens in the city.
Yet even as a school girl I knew there was no real threat, especially not to tourists or tories. Knife crime was and has remained exceedingly rare across the capital. In London the rate of homicide falls under 0.0 per 1000 residents.
Which meant I was completely unprepared when the gun fired.
Footage rolling out of the United States this week jogged my memory and shook loose what I’d witnessed as an exchange student. Over in Nashville, the 17th American school shooting of 2023 has taken place. At a Christian elementary school, three staff members and three small children were murdered.
An Instagram reel (of all things) exposed me to the tragedy. A local reporter, Joylyn Bukovac, was sharing her advice on how to interact with survivors of school shootings; she had survived a middle school shooting herself. Later on TikTok I saw a video of a high school teacher explaining to his students why they store yellow buckets in the corner of each classroom.
The preparedness drilled into young people and children on how to respond to gun violence, is a frightening burden. One I’ve never had to endure.
When I went out on Avenida Universidad in 2017, the plan was to get drunk and dance. Two thick walls of students crowded either side of the strip, spilling out from the clubs and looking for fresh air, cigarettes and conversation, far away from the thumping beat of reggaeton.
I’d decided that the outside of a club called Vidy’s was my spot. You could keep one ear on what song was playing, ready to dive back in and the little patio provided a buffer between my small group and the cars ploughing down the street.
It was here and in a drunken stupor, that I saw everyone around me collapse in silence. It took the gun firing a second time for me to crash down in terror, joining them in curling up.
This is the moment that I remember distinctly, despite all the booze. The entire streetful of young people silently braced against the ground. The feeling of my friend’s hand clamped around my wrist, conveying through sheer force that this wasn’t a joke. The thought that floated into my head, of gratitude that some concrete pillars partially blocked the distance between us and the shooter.
Then just like that, the ripple of movement that we’d all mimicked, collapsing into huddled bodies on the ground, began anew as we slowly stood back up. I was mocked for my terrified expression at the sound of the second shot. Someone pointed out the blood on the street.
Ambulances and police seemed to arrive in the next second. This wasn’t a mass shooting. I later heard it was a drive by. An unnamed man was murdered, with little news coverage or information released in the following days. I’ve been unable to find any more information behind who he was or why this happened.
As suddenly as it began, it ended.
In the long chaos of the night that followed, I walked with my friends along streets lit by flashing blue lights, and I heard how they all knew firsthand, the pain of gun violence. From family members to school friends, everyone had experienced a loss caused by a gun.
This world, the one that I’d been sent into as a 20 year old student, suddenly felt completely divorced from mine. In an acute, insurmountable way.
A few months later I left.
By the time my American J-1 visa expired, I was back in Europe, spending a semester in Málaga, Spain. What I saw left no great mark on me. I had no way to relate it to the life I’m used to.
If a gun were to go off near me again, I would assume it was a car backfiring. The threat is so alien here, I doubt there’d be any intrinsic response. No communal bracing against the ground. The sense of preparedness that I had learnt from my peers in Puerto Rico, eventually became forgettable.
This privilege, an assumption of relative safety especially from firearms, is not particularly unique. It’s just a sign of a normal, healthy society.
The philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, uses the idea of dogmatism, to describe how people like me have been able to grow up with an assumed understanding of what is acceptable, what I can reasonably expect to encounter.
“Ethical progress produces a beneficial form of dogmatism. A normal, healthy society does not debate whether rape and torture are acceptable, because the public ‘dogmatically’ accepts that they are beyond the pale.”
Eventually we as a society, don’t really debate everything. We all come to unthinkingly accept certain ideas, like how rape and torture are bad and unacceptable. It would hinder progress if we kept having to cyclically contest foundational ideas. Eventually the collective has to move on.
Yet from across the Atlantic, the USA seems to me trapped in a cycle of debating gun ownership again and again. In the process its population is forced to endure unending gun violence, stuck in a stalemate that refuses to move on and grant the community safety and peace.
A man was shot and killed a few metres from where I stood. His life was taken in a flash of gunpowder and noise. He was a whole person, who had the same innate right to life and safety that I have.
I got to forget.
Extending and granting this privilege to all people, regardless of where they live, isn’t an empty dream.
But before the forgetting, there is the fight.
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