Are You a Survivor of Gun Violence?
A personal look at how gun violence touches all of us
Lockdown button at the entrance of William Fremd High School in Palatine, Illinois (photo by Gabe Classon)
By: JJ Janflone
“Would you consider yourself a survivor of gun violence? Have you experienced any gun violence in your life?”
“Oh, no.”
As of today, I’ve been working in gun violence prevention for five years. When I started, I told people I was a total novice, that I had no experience with gun violence. That wasn’t strictly true.
When I first interviewed in person for my job at Brady, I faced a lot of the standard questions you'd expect from a social justice organization — what’s your theory of change, how do you approach communications, partnerships, teamwork, and metrics? How do you prefer to be managed? How did you hear about Brady? And so on. All good questions. But mixed in there was a question about whether I considered myself a survivor of gun violence.
Without hesitation, I said no. I had no experience with firearms violence, or so I thought. The interview moved on, and I did my best to share my experiences and make the interviewers laugh — a go-to method that’s served me well.
But, unknowingly, I lied.
Being an American means being impacted by gun violence. I had many brushes with it.
In 2016, several classmates were shot at outside a campus library during an attempted robbery. Thankfully, none were physically injured. In 2011, one of my most beloved residents, Matt, was shot and killed by his mother in a murder-suicide, a tragedy that rocked the small liberal arts campus where I served as a resident assistant. Before that, in 2006, a classmate I sat next to for most of elementary school shot and killed a man during a robbery. The classmate was just 17 and had bought the gun illegally.
Interspersed between these major tragedies were numerous other moments of horror: a coworker being shot at while driving; participating in a "Stop the Bleed" training as a TA; receiving emergency alert texts about an armed person on campus; learning from my law enforcement father where to hide during a shooting; enduring another mass shooting in the news; and another, and another….
Shortly after being hired at Brady, but before moving from Colorado to Virginia, I started to fully understand the pervasive nature of gun violence in American life. My Mandarin tutor also taught at a local elementary/middle school, and she asked me if I’d come in and tell the kids about why Chinese language learning was so important — namely, the scholarships available to them for higher education and the doors language acquisition can open for them professionally.
But I ended up only telling one class.
Midway through our second class, an alarm went off. There was a shooter on campus. We were in lockdown. The teacher hadn’t been alerted to a drill, nor had the students. It seemed real.
I watched as a group of eight-year-olds, previously boisterous and filled with the joy only a guest speaker (and therefore no homework) can bring, turned into a well-oiled machine in a system that had taught them they had to be to avoid death.
They turned off lights, shut curtains, piled up tables and tiny chairs. They huddled in a far corner of the room, stone silent. One politely told me in a whisper that I couldn’t sit in a chair but instead needed to crouch down.
Someone banged on the door, a cop knock, the loud bang-bang-bang that denotes someone in charge has arrived. He demanded entry. The kids remained silent. The man outside the door walked on. We heard more bangs from down the hall. And as I sat there, cold linoleum working its way through my pantyhose, time passed… and slowly but surely, as the sirens kept playing, the kids unraveled. They fidgeted, shifted, started to talk, one cried. Their teacher tried to calm them, but I was useless. I went to text my husband, my parents, but then paused — what if it was a drill? It had to be a drill.
And then suddenly, the alarm stopped. The principal came on and announced that the drill was over. Almost all, but not all, of the classrooms had passed. Those that hadn’t — and a list of names was rattled off — would have a visit from the school security officer shortly for more training.
Third period would begin in ten minutes. Block schedule was continuing.
Perhaps more horrific was how quickly everything returned to normal because, of course, waiting in your classroom to be killed was now part of these kids' academic existence.
They put the chairs and table back. They washed their hands and faces in the sink in the corner, with the help of a little step stool. They opened up the curtains to a sunny Denver day. They settled in again, waiting for me to tell them how exciting and grand their futures would be.
As I left the school that day, I texted Ky Hunter, then the VP of Programs at Brady. My long, rambling message could be summed up in two sentences: “Holy shit. Let’s do this.”
I ended up starting my work at Brady a week early. On August 3, a man motivated by hate killed 23 people and injured 22 others in El Paso, Texas. On August 4, another man shot and killed nine people and wounded 17 others in Dayton, Ohio. Brady needed more people, so I shuffled in, sans an ID card or an email login, but ready to be a dogsbody as everyone on staff pulled 24-hour shifts trying to help.
In a strange, terrible twist of fate, one of the victims in the Dayton shooting, Nicholas, had graduated from my small high school in western Pennsylvania. He was killed while rendering first aid. I never met him — we were 5 years apart — but he played in the band, too. I live back in my hometown now, and they’ve named a park after him.
It’s been five years since then, and the horrors have persisted. More shootings than I could ever write about. Survivors who sobbed into my microphone, telling their stories, desperate just to share something about their loved ones that would encapsulate everything amazing that had made up their child, friend, spouse, parent. Researchers and providers who, curled up on the floor of our studio (because of course we didn’t have furniture, we were a nonprofit podcast), begged people to just do the things they knew, they knew, would help stop the violence.
More than anything, though, I’ve watched my coworkers. Some who are survivors, directly impacted by gun violence, yet still show up every day. Others, like me, who would answer no but honestly need another answer — an “of course, it’s America” answer.
Five years into working in the gun violence prevention field, I am still so young in a field marked by people who have spent a lifetime working to make the country better, safer. I am proud to say that the work I’ve done, the work Brady has done, and the work of all those dedicated to gun violence prevention have made it so that fewer people need to identify as survivors. Fewer people need to answer with an “of course.” Thousands, perhaps millions, of people will never know the horror they sidestepped.
Yet, so many will still be near a shooting, injured, or frightened in their classrooms, and later lie when they say they haven’t been impacted by gun violence. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Five years in, five years of talking to anyone who would listen, have showed me that, “Yeah, you have too.”
Here’s not to five more years, because I, like everyone else in this fight, would like to be out of a job sooner rather than later. So instead, here’s to a world where it’s not a lie to say you haven’t been impacted by gun violence in America.
JJ Janflone is the Partnerships Manager at Brady. She is also the producer and co-host of their award-winning educational podcast, Red, Blue, and Brady.