Aussie family’s brush with school shooting crisis after move to US

Aussie journalist Nathan Vass moved his family to the US – and encountered the fear that grips American parents.

There are many cultural challenges – more than you might expect – when you move from Australia to live in the US.

But the most confronting was the first time our family had a brush – albeit a mild one, thank goodness – with America’s heartbreaking school shooting crisis.

In short, my then mid-teen sons came home from a party one night in the first few months we lived in the States and said, “Dad, there’s going to be a shooting at our school tomorrow”.

That was the hot chat at the party and no one was going to school the next day.

I thought they were kidding around and packed them off to school.

A police roadblock restricts access to Oxford High School following a deadly shooting. Picture: Matthew Hatcher/Getty/AFP

A student released from hospital after being shot at Oxford High School joins a vigil for the victims of the incident. Picture: Jeff Kowalsky/AFP

It just seemed like some far-fetched kids’ joke resulting from watching too much American TV.

But when I got home from dropping them off, a Facebook page run by local residents and parents revealed that other locals were not taking the threat as lightly as me.

It turned out that many families decided not to send their kids to the high school that day, based on the rumour that there was going to be a shooting.

I rang the school and said I had not understood this was a serious risk and I was going to pick up my boys. The woman said yes, of course.

Nothing happened. There was no shooting. But that was my initiation into the reality of high school shootings being something that you had to factor into living in the US.

This week’s shooting at Oxford High School, north of Detroit, was the 139th this year. The shootings stopped, of course, last year, one of the few positives out of the pandemic.

But sadly, school shootings are back and just a part of US life once more. And as of Wednesday afternoon, Joe Biden hadn’t made a comment. Just another day.