What is wrong with us?
Screaming spectators scrambling for the exits. Players dashing to their benches, then clambering over the boards and skating hard across the ice to their dressing rooms.
Hockey players from six Rhode Island high schools gathered at the Dennis M. Lynch Arena in Pawtucket on a perfect President’s Day afternoon to play the game they love.
Instead of cheers for a power play goal, though, they heard the sickening report of gunfire.
In a sign of the times in Rhode Island athletics, two co-op teams — Coventry/Johnston and Blackstone Valley Schools, which consists of players from St. Raphael Academy, Providence Country Day, North Providence High and North Smithfield High — were skating against each other. Individually, each school lacks sufficient numbers to field a team. Collectively, they can compete.
Monday was Senior Night —okay, Senior Afternoon — for Blackstone Valley. School officials recognized players whose high school career is ending soon.
Monday was also the first day of February school vacation week so the atmosphere inside the old rink just off Broad Street had to be more than festive.
That is until the moment in the first period when a person with at least one gun opened fire on their family in the stands. The game, as many high-school and college contests are, was being streamed so the ensuing horror was recorded.
Pop! Pop! Pop-pop-pop! Pop!
Pawtucket police arrived in minutes. Police from nearby communities followed. But the shooting, thankfully, was over. As of late Monday, the tally was three dead, including the shooter, and three seriously wounded in critical condition at Rhode Island Hospital.
A mass shooting at a high school hockey game?
What is wrong with us?
Youth sports are supposed to be about playing hard, teamwork, celebrating victory, accepting defeat, respecting your opponent and, above all, having fun. In high school, add cheerleaders, pep bands, pompoms, banners, face paint, and good-natured insults to old rivals, and you have the stuff of memories that last decades.
But I must be old-fashioned because I never imagined guns, shootings, or violent death at a high school game. Any game, youth, high school, college or pro, for that matter. Yet a few months ago, I saw a video of a man at a youth basketball game in Providence leave the grandstand, brandish a knife and charge the referee. A kids’ basketball game! Fortunately, nobody was hurt.
Anyone who follows European soccer can recall bloody, deadly violence between fans of rival clubs.
But high school hockey?
What is wrong with us?
Acts of gun violence may not be the norm, but they occur so frequently in America that we have become desensitized. Until the violence occurs close to home.
Remember Saturday, December 13, 2025? A gunman burst into a lecture hall at Brown University where students were preparing for an economics exam, killed two and wounded nine. He had been a graduate student at Brown two decades earlier. The next day he shot and killed an MIT professor who had been a classmate during their undergraduate days in Portugal.
Remember the mass shootings at Sandy Hook, Conn.; Lewiston, Maine; Colorado Springs, Colo.; Highland Park, Mich.; Uvalde, Texas; El Paso,Texas; Pittsburgh, Pa.;
Parkland, Fla.; Sutherland Springs, Texas? Las Vegas, Nev.? The list goes on and on.
What is the usual response from our elected leaders? Thoughts and prayers. Moments of silence. From fellow citizens? Sidewalk memorials, flowers, cards, photos, stuffed animals. In this Pawtucket case, a call for hockey sticks propped outside front doors.
What good do they do? Not much.
What is wrong with us?
The simple answer in my opinion: we have too many guns in America. Would you believe 500 million? The statistics culled from federal surveys and agencies are sobering. We have about 335 million people in the U.S. That averages out to about 1.5 guns per person.
Here’s another way to look at it: Rhode Island has a population of about 1 million. That’s 500 guns for every person living in our state.
Gun rights advocates cite the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms. They say people with mental health issues, not guns, are the problem. I maintain if there were fewer guns available, there would be fewer mass shootings. I was in high school 60 years ago. We had fire drills, not active shooter drills. We did not have this carnage. We did not have 500 million guns either.
What is wrong with us?
In the last 25 years, we Americans have lost respect for each other. We focus on our differences more than our similarities. The media thrive on highlighting liberals versus conservatives, progressives versus evangelical Christians. We forget that many of us fall somewhere in the great moderate middle.
The loss of respect starts at the top. Our political leaders are obsessed with obtaining and maintaining power, not ruling for the common good. Look at the White House. President Trump is a master of mean-spirited, derogatory, inflammatory, insulting and erroneous commentary. Many of his sycophantic minions are no better. His masked ICE agents shot and killed two American citizens on the streets of Minneapolis, their violence recorded by residents with their cell phones.
Move on to Capitol Hill, where Congress is stuck in do-nothing mode.
Can we fix what’s wrong with us?
Of course. First, we must treat each other with respect. Then we must find the common ground that is good for all of us, that unites us. Then we must act. We must get this done.
Here in Rhode Island, we are a small state. We are growing closer thanks to regionalized schools and career and technical programs that accept out-of-district students. Travel teams, clubs and high-school co-op teams bring our kids even closer together. Everybody knows everybody in Rhode Island. On the field and in the stands.
We already have tough gun laws in Rhode Island, but we have had two tragedies in two months. We must do more to address underlying causes.
We owe it to ourselves, for sure, but we owe it more to our children and grandchildren. We owe it to Olin Lawrence, the 16-year-old Coventry High sophomore who was in goal when the shooting started Monday afternoon. Later, he described his feelings to WPRI’s Kim Kalunian.
“I’m overwhelmed and very nervous,” he told her. “You don’t know what it feels like until you’re actually in it.”
No one should know that feeling. So, can we please start working to right what is wrong with us?
Mike Szostak regularly comments on sports for Ocean State Media. The views expressed here are the author’s, and do not reflect the views of Ocean State Media.
