The Children of the Children of Columbine

After 20 years of telling it, the story of the day you survived a school shooting can get a little rote, admits Renee Oakley, 35. She and her husband, Ben, 36, both lived through the shooting at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999.

“I’ve always been able to tell it as though I’m reading a story to somebody,” Renee told me over a car Bluetooth speaker as she drove through Seattle with Ben, who agreed: “It feels automated” for him, too, he says.

In some ways, that’s probably for the best. Both Ben and Renee have shared their story many times over the years, sometimes in public forums, and having a succinct, memorized script can help when you’re reliving a tragedy in front of an audience. But for Renee, the script fell by the wayside when her audience consisted of one particular person: her daughter, Emma.

One afternoon before Renee married Ben, Emma came home and announced that she’d had a lockdown during the day at school. Emma was 7 at the time, and Renee, who lives with what she described as severe PTSD, said she had a small panic attack. She immediately called the school: “I was like, ‘What the hell happened?’” It was a drill, the school reassured her; the students had just been practicing for an active-shooter situation. And that’s when Renee decided it was time to talk to Emma about Columbine.

Survivors of the Columbine High School shooting are in their mid-30s today, old enough to have children of their own who now participate in lockdown drills and campus-safety trainings. The ones who