• by Joe Mandese , August 29, 2025

The most terrifying thing about this week's school shooting was listening to 10-year-old survivor Weston Halsne describe to reporters what he witnessed. It's not that he appeared terrified. It was that he didn't. He seemed as calm and collected as any seasoned, media-trained professional commentator might have been in a similar situation.

And I don't mean that observation in a good way. I mean it in a terrifying way, because it signals to me that -- a quarter century after Columbine, a dozen years after Sandy Hook and a half dozen after Parkland -- we have raised a generation of Americans that are expectant, if not calloused and inured, to being put in such situations.

Apologies to Halsne, if I misunderstood his appearance, because it very well may have been in shock, experiencing profound PTSD, etc., but his composure before cameras and the press did not reveal that.

So I'm jumping to this conclusion. And sadly, I'm not surprised by it, because that is how this generation has been raised.

I know firsthand from the experiences my now-retired wife had as a teacher not to far from Sandy Hook what that has been like, including the incessant school shooter drills.

I think I even shared a previous anecdote about the day she arrived at her desk to find a five-gallon bucket and plastic tarp on it with no note or explanation. Only later did she learn its purpose was for sheltering in place.

Certainly, this is not the first generation of schoolchildren raised and trained for existential threats. I recall the nuclear attack drills I participated in as an elementary school student in the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis in the early 1960s.

Like a bucket and tarp, the drills didn't seem all that prudent -- they consisted of ducking our heads under our desks and remaining quiet.

I know the indirect trauma of that affected me at some deep-rooted level, but I never had to experience what I was preparing for firsthand, and I have no idea how I might have responded as a witness if confronted by news media afterward, but I'm pretty sure I would not be calm and collected the way Weston Halsne appeared.

This is not by any means a knock against him. He seemed very brave to me. I just find it sad -- and particularly noteworthy -- that a 10-year-old witness to a school shooting could be that way.

Kids are not supposed to be calm and collected in the face of horror like that.

And if that's what they've become, I'm calling them Generation D, because we've raised a generation of children who -- due to repeated exposure to something horrific and unimaginable -- have grown desensitized to it when it actually happens.

Now, as for our lawmakers and civic leaders responsible for the lax gun-control policies contributing to it -- well, they became desensitized a long, long time ago.

Maybe someone should coin a generational moniker for them too.