You don't need me to tell you how it was on November 1, 1991, the day I spent most of an afternoon lying on my belly on the floor of an office in Van Allen Hall on the University of Iowa campus. At the time, I didn't know what was going on outside that room or what those loud popping sounds were. I knew only that those popping sounds weren't the sound of construction taking place next door, that those sounds were different. I knew only that we locked the door and turned out the lights, and I lay there smelling the smell of that institutional carpet on the floor, the carpet I pressed my 10- and 4-year-old children's faces into, and that at some point maybe the SWAT officers would come and tell us everything was fine.
But you don't need me to tell you that things weren't fine.
Open up a search tab on your browser. Look up "University of Iowa mass shootings 1991." Pick any result link: Wikipedia. NY Times. Amazon. Murderpedia. It doesn't really matter which link you open; they all offer information on what happened that day.
That day. That one day a little more than 21 years ago. A blip in the chronology of mass murder in my country. "Only" five people were murdered before the shooter killed himself. One young woman, my friend Miya Rodolfo-Sioson, was shot and survived; the bullet severed her spinal cord, and she lived as a quadriplegic until her cancer death in 2008.
The list of facts about November 1, 1991, is endless. And so, it seems, is the list of mass shootings our nation will put up with in the name of "freedom."