We must preserve school shooting sites

In 2004, on the 10th anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda, I went there with a team that was helping the government revise school history curricula. At the national memorial in the capital Kigali, we saw clothing, weapons and video testimonies documenting the killing of 800,000 people over a 100-day period.

But what struck me the most was a site we visited outside the city, where victims had found shelter in a school. Their killers set them on fire and burned them alive. And when the genocide ended, authorities decided to preserve the site rather than bulldoze it.

We walked through the ruins of the school and saw everything that was still inside: charred desks and chairs, a blackboard, and, yes, human remains. It made a more lasting impression than any museum or memorial.

I thought about this preserved space recently, as crews began demolishing the site of the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida. I understand the desire to demolish the building, where 14 students and three teachers were killed. It reminds us of the indescribable horror that gun violence has inflicted on this community and our nation as a whole.

But that’s precisely why I wish we could preserve it. Ditto for the sites of school shootings in Uvalde, Texas, and Newtown, Connecticut.

Tearing them down allows us to look away from the true atrocity of gun violence in the United States, which has claimed nearly 50,000 lives in 2023. And it delays the day when we could do something real about it. stop.

Every time a school shooting happens, we say: not again. No more. But there is always more. Our attention span is limited and the truth of what happened is too terrible to contemplate.

In Parkland, however, this truth has been visible for almost six years. The victims died in the old freshmen building, which was preserved as a crime scene while the shooter stood trial. Jurors walked through the building and saw bloodstains and broken glass. They also saw remains of flowers and balloons, grim reminders that the massacre took place on Valentine's Day.

The rest of us should see it too. But we won't, because the building is collapsing.

Ditto for the Robb school in Uvalde, where authorities plan to demolish the building where 21 people were murdered in 2022. “We can never ask a child to return there, nor a teacher to return to this school” , declared the mayor of the city. said.

He is of course right: we should not keep the building as an active school, which would force the victims of the tragedy to return there. I just wish it would remain open to others, so we can all witness what Uvalde experienced on that terrible day.

In Parkland, a man who lost his 14-year-old son said he was glad the site of the shooting had been preserved until now. That allowed officials — including Vice President Kamala Harris and Education Secretary Miguel Cardona — to visit and see the horror for themselves.

Another victim's father said his wife found meaning in the tragedy by escorting visitors through the site. He also said his son – whose sister was murdered in the attack – feared people would forget about him when the building collapsed.

I was happy to learn that Parkland will erect a permanent memorial to the victims on a bucolic site on the outskirts of town. Similarly, Sandy Hook chose a wooded setting for its own memorial to the 20 children and six adults gunned down at its school in 2012.

Sandy Hook School itself is long gone, replaced by a beautiful new building filled with color and natural light. Much like the memorial, it is a beautiful way to honor the victims of the tragedy.

Yet, as one of my own teachers once told me, all acts of remembering are also acts of forgetting. By choosing to commemorate these tragedies in peaceful, pastoral places, we bury the violence and brutality within them.

By choosing to commemorate these tragedies in peaceful, pastoral places, we bury the violence and brutality within them.

A list of names placed in front of a pool of water creates a very different effect than a classroom riddled with bullet holes. We need to see both.

Several years ago, my wife and I visited the site of the former Nazi extermination camp Dachau. We saw a giant crematorium, which seemed to look at us like a mute testimony of the murdered. At Auschwitz, where the largest number of Holocaust victims perished, one can physically enter a gas chamber.

These macabre remains do not detract from the magnificent Holocaust memorials around the world. But they add a necessary note of reality to a horror we would all rather ignore. We must not – and cannot – look away. Not yet. Not any longer.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Free Speech and Why You Should Give a Damn (with illustrations by artist Signe Wilkinson) and eight other books.