Flowers, balloons, and other items in memory of victims of a mass shooting are left at a makeshift memorial at the entrance of The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee on March 29.Seth Herald/Getty Images
Phone trees activated. Social media conversations initiated. Text alerts distributed. Police mobilized. Fear ricocheting from students to parents and then to neighbours. Two universities locked down. Active-shooting protocols imposed. SWAT teams assembled.
And then … nothing.
That was the scene in Pittsburgh on Wednesday morning when word went forth that there was a shooting incident at Central Catholic, the city’s most prestigious boys’ high school, and at Oakland Catholic, its sister school a few steps away. Those reports sent a chill through a community that, five years ago, experienced the slaying of 11 Jews at morning prayer at the Tree of Life synagogue a mere 2.4 kilometres away.
This time, the reports of mass shootings at the two schools were hoaxes – “computer-generated swatting calls,” in the characterization of police officials – that were replicated at multiple schools throughout central and western Pennsylvania. There were similar “swatting” hoaxes – alerts to emergency personnel placed with the intention of spreading false threats that spread community fear – in recent days, many with similar details, involving dozens of schools in Massachusetts, Utah, Iowa and other states.
In all these places, the result was the creation of concern and chaos, police mustering and public panic – all underlining how ordinary the episodes of school shootings have become in the United States.
“Whatever it was, this robocall, however it got out, it continues to tell us the days and times that we live in,” Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey told reporters shortly after the episodes.
Though there were no killings, and not even any shootings Wednesday, there was tragedy in these incidents nonetheless. That’s because, fear of school shootings in American schools has gone from the onerous to the oppressive and to, most calamitous of all, the ordinary.
“The mere threats of gun violence rippling through all aspects of our lives here in the United States – but especially schools – is horrific and yet it is repeating itself so often that it is becoming a routine experience, like the occasional touching down of a tornado,” said David Harris, the expert on U.S. crime who spoke during a lockdown at the University of Pittsburgh, less than a kilometre from the high schools where the hoax played out.
Faculty, administrators, staff members and students also were subject to a lockdown at Carnegie Mellon University, which is a few steps from Central Catholic, with similar restrictions at the Pittsburgh Public Schools administration building and Pittsburgh’s Science and Technology Academy. Public buses were rerouted around the area. Students at Oakland Catholic were escorted to nearby Saint Paul Cathedral.
While similar hoaxes were reported hundreds of kilometres from Pittsburgh, the episode touched especially sensitive nerves in the city, where jury selection for the trial of Robert Bowers, the accused gunman in the synagogue shooting, began this month.
“Reactivation of previous trauma and trauma cues can make people feel they are going back to a really dark time and a really difficult moment,’’ said Maggie Feinstein, the professional counselor who is director of the 10.27 Healing Partnership, which was created to assist Pittsburghers in the wake of the October 27, 2018, shooting that gave the group its name. “It’s important that people attend to that deactivation trauma, even if they are safe. In our town – and unfortunately we are part of the community no one wants to be a part of – that’s important.”
Mass shootings anywhere, with any targets, are deplorable, but they provide a special horror when children are involved, in part because they are especially vulnerable in school settings and also because, as John F. Kennedy told the United States Committee for UNICEF four months before he was the victim of a fatal 1963 gunshot attack himself, “children are the world’s most valuable resource and its best hope for the future.”
The school-shooting hoaxes came just two days after the shooting at The Covenant School in Nashville (where six were killed, plus the alleged shooter) and a week after the shooting at East High School in Denver (two injured, the alleged shooter found dead). In all, there have been 376 school shootings – including four dozen last year – since the initial modern one, at Columbine High School in Colorado, in 1999.
“Schools are particularly vulnerable to these sorts of incidents,” said Thomas McGough, former board chair at Pittsburgh’s Shady Side Academy. “There, children’s lives are at stake and threats to children are a particularly volatile and reprehensible action.”
At Central Catholic – alma mater of the playwright August Wilson, NFL quarterbacks Marc Bulger and Dan Marino, all-star pitcher Sam McDowell, basketball Hall of Famer Jack Twyman and Costco co-founder Jack Sinegal – students were sent home. “Everybody lives in fear today,” said Bishop David Zubic in an interview. “No place is safe anywhere, anymore. And we don’t know what the effect of these hoaxes will be on our students.”
That was the concern in the hours after the hoax at the city’s two Catholic schools.
“No school at any level should have to bear the responsibility for his type of irrational behaviour,” said John McGinley Jr., a prominent Central Catholic benefactor and member of the school’s Hall of Fame. “Our school has a tradition from the Christian Brothers of caring for our students, and that causes all of us to be affected deeply by even the hint there could be a tragedy on our campus.”
That hint was a hoax, at least this time. The next time it might be real.
“We simply cannot live in a country in which threatened or actual violence, particularly gun violence, is some kind of regular thing,” said Prof. Harris, who teaches at Pitt’s law school. “It’s like reports of terrible storms – you don’t know when they are going to strike. But this is not weather. It is human-caused death and injury and it is a moral failure of our society that we permit children be slaughtered by military weapons or to be subject to cruel hoaxes about gun violence.”