American exceptionalism

Local TV reporter covering Nashville school shooting had survived shooting at her own high school

Such is the reach of America's mass shooting epidemic that people who survived one shooting at their high school sometimes have to endure a second school shooting at their university. Or report on one for their jobs.

Joylyn Bukovac, the reporter covering Monday's mass shooting at the private Covenant School in Nashville for NBC affiliate WSMV, had witnessed a shooting at her high school in Alabama in 2010, she told viewers. In Monday's mass shooting, a 28-year-old former student with two semiautomatic rifles and a handgun murdered three adults and three 9-year-olds. Along with describing her own experience, Bukovac offered advice for parents trying to help their children work through the shock and trauma of a school shooting.

A mother who lived through last year's mass shooting at a July 4 parade in the Chicago suburb Highland Park was also near the Nashville tragedy, visiting a friend who lost a son in the 2018 shooting at a Waffle House in Antioch, Tennessee, The Washington Post reports. 

The visiting Highland Park resident, Ashbey Beasley, conveyed her own message after walking up to a bank of microphones outside Covenant School. "Aren't you guys tired of covering this?" she asked. "How is this still happening? How are our children still dying?"

"I just was like, 'I have to say something,'" Beasley, 47, told the Post. "Because I just feel like, how many more?" She explained she had been on her way to meet her friend, Shaundelle Brooks, when Brooks called in a panic because her younger son's school, near Covenant, was in lockdown. "I couldn't even fully process it," Beasley told the Post. "What do you say? Because only in America can you survive a mass shooting and go and make a friend who is the victim of a mass shooting and then go to meet that friend for lunch . . . and end up in the middle of another mass shooting event."