“I never thought it could happen in Prague”
Words fail every soul who ever lived or visited Prague. It was a shock to see the images from the shooting in Prague today. A tragedy. We park close to the university whenever we visit my sisters in Prague … it used to be the safest city on earth even at midnight let alone at 3 pm …
Czech Republic authorities are probing the potential connection between a series of violent, expletive-laden Russian-language messages posted on Telegram and the perpetrator of the university shooting, as confirmed by the police chief.
One of the messages posted by the user indicated that inspiration for the attack may have been drawn from two previous mass shootings in Russia—one occurring this month at a school in Bryansk near the Ukraine border, and the second in 2021 in Kazan, the capital of the Russian region of Tatarstan.
“I was very inspired by Alina … very much,” a message shared on 10 December said, just three days after a 14-year-old Russian girl, Alina Afanaskina, opened fire on her classmates.
The shooting killed two students. “She certainly did not kill enough. I will try to fix that,” the message said.
“I always wanted to kill. I thought I would be a maniac in the future,” another message from the user said
Day of mourning declared in Czech Republic after gunman kills 14 at Prague university
Prague: “Hey, you f-----, here I am, shoot here!” screamed a Czech reporter trying to distract a gunman who killed 14 people at a university building in Prague on Thursday, helping people to flee the country’s worst mass shooting.
Students leap from windows, hide in classrooms to escape shooter at Prague's Charles University
Student shoots 14 people dead at university in Prague
Wong 'shocked and saddened' after mass shooting at Prague university
Shootings are ‘spreading like a disease in Europe,’ says survivor of deadly Prague attack
Shooting in Philosophy Building at Charles University in Prague (updated)
Eleven people were killed and approximately 30 more injured in a shooting that took place at Charles University in Prague, in the building that houses the university’s Department of Philosophy. The shooter is dead. (more…)
We are the generation of mass shootings.
We are the generation that has come of age with gun violence. School shootings have grown up alongside us: From elementary, to middle, to high school, and now college, we have seen our peers shot down with increasing frequency. We are the students who graduate with degrees in lockdowns and normalized mass paranoia.
We are the generation taught to hide. We have learned to second guess a fire alarmout of fear that it could be a gunman trying to flush students into the hallway. We have crouched under desks and rushed to turn off classroom electronics as we drill, and drill, and drill the proper actions should an active shooter ever enter our building. We hope this protocol will persist in our muscle memories, if not readily accessible in our panic-petrified minds; we pray each infinitesimal adjustment to our postures will maximize our potential for survival. Our teachers cut the lights, yank shades over windows, and stash buckets of rocks in their desk drawers alongside surplus number two pencils. We leap out of windows and lock ourselves in storage closets.
We don’t make a sound.
We are the generation whose worst fears are realized regularly. “Run. Hide. Fight.” That was the message Michigan State University students received on February 13, when a gunman fatally shot three students and injured five others. According to the Washington Post, more than 338,000 of us have experienced gun violence in school since the Columbine school shooting in 1999. This is not just a drill in a classroom. This is real.
We are the generation that watches our backs. Any public setting is vulnerable to the epidemic of gun violence. Malls, clubs, concerts, and college campuses are only a few of the hundreds of places we frequent where the terrifying thought crosses our minds: What if it were to happen here? Where would we hide, where could we run? The back door of a lecture hall opens and the hairs on the back of our necks become electric. What if? When living on a college campus as open as Harvard’s, it’s hard not to let fear pervade the architecture of our everyday life.
We are the generation that suppresses our emotions. We have become an excruciating combination of overanxious and desensitized in response to the staggering number of mass shootings in this country. There have been 80 mass shootings so far in 2023, over the span of just a handful of weeks — yet our lives must continue on. So we try not to think about it. Every time a new tragedy replaces another one in the headlines, we add it to a collection of worries festering in silence, the wounds too repetitive to ever fully be unpacked. We cannot help but wonder what effect this toll has on our national psyche — and on our mental health.
We are the generation of sorrow. We mourn for the students who lost their lives in the tragic shooting at Michigan State, a calamity that should never have transpired. We offer our deepest condolences to their families and friends, who have been added to the ever-growing list of loved ones whose lives will forever be scarred along the contours of gun violence.
We are the generation demanding solutions. Mass shootings, a uniquely American problem, are also caused by overwhelmingly white and male perpetrators, making this violence frustratingly difficult to disentangle from other societal issues. Still, there’s a reason why “Common Sense” gun legislationis called “Common Sense”: Fewer guns means fewer shootings. Other countries, like Australia, have successfully combated these tragedies with legislative force. When will we do the same?
Time and time again, we have heard our government’s message loud and clear: guns over lives. We do not gain any new insights the more we wait — we are tired of begging for scraps of a solution. We wonder how many more breaths we will waste on unheard pleas while our peers must ration them in too-silent classrooms, suffocating themselves to survive.
We are the generation asking for change.
Stephen King on Mass Shootings: We’re Out of Things to Say 27 October 2023