For parents who’ve been through shootings, raising kids requires grappling with fears

LOUISVILLE, Kentucky (AP) — By the time Hollan Holm pulls the family minivan into Chickasaw Park, the buzz rising from a crowd clustered around a large picnic shelter makes clear this afternoon’s story-sharing is already underway.

In the thick heat just outside the pavilion, a youth football coach recounts the grief of losing his 19-year-old son, shot dead in the parking lot of a local liquor store in 2012. Under the rafters, a mother of five, infant son balanced on her hip, recalls her 15-year-old cousin, gunned down just across the park last December.

Holm also carries a story of trauma. But it’s from his own youth, when it was shattered by gunshots.

“Dad, are you speaking today?” asks his daughter, Sylvia, a sixth grader wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai, shot by a Taliban fighter at 15 for asserting girls’ right to an education.

“They’ve got other folks lined up,” says Holm, who a generation ago survived one of the first school mass shootings to shake America’s consciousness.

His son, George, 8, groans.

“Yeah,” Holm says, rolling his eyes. “You guys want to hear me talk.”

They do, actually.

But how can Holm, now 40 and a lawyer for a health care company, make sense for them of what he and classmates in a small Kentucky town endured that long-ago morning?

After a record number of mass killings this year and surging youth deaths by firearms, it can be challenging for any parent to reassure their children and to set aside their own fears.

It can be even harder for those who survived the school shootings of the Columbine era, now that they have children of their own.

“I can’t really go into crowds of people and not be concerned about maybe somebody’s going to do something with a...