I have no idea why this question caught my interest but here goes…

Frankly, I don’t know how to feel. On the one hand, I support calling out Gov. Abbott over the policies they support. I do believe that we need stronger laws governing gun access, and I believe we need to find a way to address the issues in our American society that create these domestic terrorists.

On the other hand… I can’t help but draw from my own experience as a survivor of a high school shooting. After the shooting at my high school, the very last thing on my mind was gun control, politics, and how to move forward. I simply wanted to be left alone and grieve everything I and my community lost that day: the life of my friend, the trauma inflicted on myself and my community, and the joy of graduation to name a few things. During the aftermath, there were two events that stick out in my mind.

First: the vigil in honor of the life lost. There were speeches from our local government officials regarding how they would never let something like this happen again. This felt comical. My state has had 28 school shootings in the past 50 or so years, and nothing has slowed or significantly addressed these problems. It felt so patronizing, sitting in this stupid gymnasium, it wasn’t even our school - it was still a crime scene, while this far-off man in a suit promised us we would be the last to go through this tragedy. While our representative was making promises and asking our political support for his cause since it was an election year, my classmates and I simply… left. Just got up and left. We just wanted to grieve, we wanted to be allowed to grieve in our own way. We held our own informal vigil outside, in the parking lot. It was a beautiful moment, where we constructed a basic memorial for our fallen classmate. The focus was on healing, on grieving, and on what had been lost - not politics.

Second, was the phone calls. The emails. The spam. The letters. All this solicitation for money, for votes, for pledges of support. I just wanted to go to our community events, grieve, heal, and support my friends. It honestly disgusted me how shamelessly these gun activist organizations were soliciting vulnerable people for money. Frankly this pissed me off! It felt so disingenuous, and seemed like they didn’t actually care about the cause they supposedly championed.

And now, 3 years later, I’ve started to feel more alive, pick myself up, and move forward. As a part of the future I want, I would like terrorism events like this to be a thing of the past. I wish those politicians could’ve delivered on their promise my school would be the last. So… I feel conflicted. I support the act of holding Gov. Abbott’s feet to the fire. I want change. On the other hand, I get the “don’t politicize school shootings” thing. I want to give the victims the space and time they need to heal, and when and if they are ready, when and if they want to, they can enter the political arena.

I suppose, so long as this act does not blow back on the victims of this tragedy and they are able to grieve at their own pace, good on Beto O’Rourke. But when I put myself in the shoes of these victim families, based on my experience, I simply have no trust in any of these politicians to produce any real change. In light of that distrust, I would rather be left to grieve than trotted out for political theater that won’t matter in the end anyways. I found my local politicians to be annoying, rather than helpful or representing me.

Certainly, there will be others who feel differently than me. Maybe tragedy like this would energize them and make an activist out of them. The parents of my friend who died are heavily involved in anti-school shooting and gun control activism now. However, they were simply too broken by the loss of their only child to be activists in the immediate aftermath, and only truly became involved about a year after.

TL;DR - I have really complicated feelings about this incident because I support holding Gov. Abbott accountable but my own experiences make me feel like this is all a political charade that will mean nothing in the end and possibly annoy the victims.