Hours after she escaped the Columbine High School shooting, 14-year-old Missy Mendo slept between her parents in bed, still wearing the shoes she had on when she fled her math class. She wanted to be ready to run.
Twenty-five years later, and with Mendo now a mother herself, the trauma from that horrific day remains close on her heels.
It caught up to her when 60 people were shot dead in 2017 at a country music festival in Las Vegas, a city she had visited a lot while working in the casino industry. Then again in 2022, when 19 students and two teachers were shot and killed in Uvalde, Texas.
I had been out of high school for four years at that point. Me and many of my high school friends wore black trench coats. Suddenly that meant you were a potential school shooter. We played D&D and Risk, that was about as violent as we got.
A couple of years later, my roommate in Job Corps saved up for months to buy this really cool trench coat from Hot Topic… and got pulled out of class the first day he wore it.
Any game as heavily based on since as Risk is likely to get violent
Not if you insist on getting Australia because it’s cool.