Megan Doney, a literature and creative writing professor at Virginia’s New River Community College, is the winner of the 2024 Washington Writers’ Publishing House Nonfiction Prize. Some might think this is her time to celebrate, but the mere mention of celebrating might cause Doney disquiet. Here’s why: Unarmed: An American Educator’s Memoir is based on a 2013 school shooting that she survived while teaching at New River. Doney may have lived through the event, but the emotional scars remain, causing her to ponder, as she writes in Unarmed, if she will ever be “okay, fixed, healed.”
Throughout Unarmed, Doney lays bare her soul, re-living the horrific day of terror that rained down on her college while also recounting other school shootings—far too many in fact: Sandy Hook, Columbine, Parkland, and Uvalde. She buttresses her recounting with startling statistics on gun violence, handily underscoring America’s irresponsible gun culture.
Doney’s anger over the senseless shootings, including the one she lived through, and the lack of research on the post-shooting trauma that teachers live with, provided the impetus for Unarmed. She explains that surviving a shooting imbues the survivor with anxiety and depression—or survivor’s guilt. Here’s proof: During a three week span in March of 2019, two Parkland survivors took their own lives and the father of Sandy Hook victim also died by suicide. Doney suggests her own guilt partially stems from her directing her students to run out of her classroom, not to shelter in place, the recommended protocol: “I could have sent my students into a gauntlet of bullets from an unknown second assailant,” she writes.
The author continues to transform her rage into research and volunteer work in an effort to “make sure that this will never happen to anyone ever again.” Her questions have taken her inside gun shows. During one such visit, she learned that, as recently as 2014 in Virginia, it was possible to purchase a gun, privately, without a background check.
In 2018, Doney volunteered to organize a march for Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students during their nationwide tour to end gun violence. Doney accompanied them to the Virginia Tech Memorial, just 20 miles from her campus, that was built to honor the 32 students and teachers who were murdered at Virginia Tech in 2007. Doney reports that, unfathomably, the students, who had recently lost 17 classmates and teachers, received a flood of death threats from gun fanatics during this tour.
Doney’s prose and facts are burnished and accurate. She writes distressing accounts of toddler-related gun deaths including the alarming data point that, in April 2016, “four toddlers killed other people with guns,” she writes before adding an aside: “In 2015, toddlers shot more people in the United States than did terrorists.”
The disquieting issue of racial targeting and police shootings are also addressed in Unarmed. The author harkens back to the 2022 murder of Jayland Walker in Akron, Ohio. What began as a traffic stop ended with Walker being shot 46 times by police as he ran away from them. Doney reminds us that Walker, a Black man, was carrying a firearm legally (and that it was in the car, not on him, when he was shot and killed), and that every police officer walked free. She also reimagines the tragic murders of Michael Brown, Anthony Gray, and Breonna Taylor: “All of them Black. None of them injured another person. All were shot and killed by police.”
Before she taught at New River Community College, Doney was a Fulbright fellow in 2007 in South Africa, where she met her husband. It was also where she witnessed a government openly admit its transgression—specifically during years of apartheid‚ on public broadcast programs: “In South Africa … no one can say we didn’t know. A community should not wipe out a part of its past,” Doney writes in Unarmed. “[Here], we wrap words like liberty and freedom around the bodies of the dead and clean up the blood and make sure that you never have to look at them again.” Her message is clear: We need to do better.
Throughout her book, Doney includes a lesson about Frankenstein. She and her students discuss Victor Frankenstein’s hubris in attempting to accomplish something extraordinary by creating the Creature. But when the Creature murders Victor’s brother and wife, Doney asks them: Who is liable?
Her answer: “We are responsible for what we bring into this world.” Doney uses Mary Shelley’s masterpiece as a mirror for modern times: In 2012, Nancy Lanza legally bought her son Adam a cache of guns, including an AR-15 Bushmaster, in an effort to bond with him. On December 14, 2012, Adam shot and killed Nancy Lanza before murdering 26 people—including 20 children—at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Who bears the responsibility for that tragedy? Doney tries to find an answer in Unarmed.