LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) — Tammy Thomson switched off the lights and crowded the children into the corner of the classroom. She tried not to think of her father or that morning 26 years ago, focusing instead on her students and the lock-down drill, this testament to a new American reality.

But the old questions came back: Had her father felt fear like this?

She whispered to the kids that everything would be OK.

That night she canceled dinner plans, told her children she wasn't well and shut her bedroom door. She wept and recalled that morning in 1989 when she and her mother and sister and brothers became early members of a grim and growing fraternity: families upended by mass, public, inexplicable murder.

"I feel very exposed, like I want to hide. I withdraw; it's hard for me to be around people. I can't laugh," Thomson said. "It's been 26 years. When is this going to stop?"

On Sept. 14, 1989, Joseph Wesbecker, a disgruntled worker wracked with rage and mental illness, stormed the Standard-Gravure printing plant with an AK-47 and killed her father, Lloyd White, and seven others before turning his gun on himself.

The TV cameras eventually packed up and the day was filed away to history — for all but the families of the dead, the 12 who were injured but survived, and dozens who hid in closets and cubicles and had to step over their friends, dead and dying, to escape.

Wesbecker robbed them of loved ones. He took the ability to walk, to laugh, to enter crowded rooms, to live without wondering what more they should have done that day.

It seemed unthinkable 26 years ago. They have watched it become almost routine.

"I feel like I'm gonna throw up each time," said Thomson's mother, Maryla White. "Because I know what these people are going to go through. And it's not just that day. It's not just the wife or the husband or the kids. It's the whole family, their whole community. And it lasts forever and ever. It never stops."

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On Dec. 3, JoAnne Self jerked awake. She had been dreaming about running through a tunnel alone, away from gun blasts and blood.

The day before, 2,000 miles away in San Bernardino, California, Tashfeen Malik and Syed Farook stormed into an office party, opened fire with assault rifles and killed 14.

"I know it's been 26 years," Self said. "But I cry whenever I see one of these on TV."

Self, a payroll administrator at Standard Gravure, was in her office on the third floor on that September morning when she heard what sounded like bulbs popping. She walked into the hallway and saw the gunman firing quickly, deliberately.

Wesbecker, a 47-year-old pressman with a long history of paranoia and manic depression, had been placed on permanent disability leave. Seething with resentment toward the company, he came to the third-floor offices looking for executives but found none. He fired indiscriminately, instead.

He roamed the building's maze of corridors, tunnels and stairways. He left 20 victims behind before he pulled out a pistol and shot himself in the head.

"I had time to get out of here. I had time to pray," says Self, forced to step over her friend's body to escape the building unharmed. "Some of those people never even had time to pray."

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Mike Campbell happily hikes up the sleeves of his shirts and the legs of his pants to show the scars left when six bullets ripped through his flesh. He talked and talked and talked about it: talk shows, reporters, Congress. He thought the world should know what a weapon of war had done to him.

"Why don't people understand that it's going to get worse if we don't do something about it?" he has said, again and again, for 26 years.

Campbell, then a 51-year-old pressman, had surgeries for weeks, sat in a wheelchair for months and walked with a limp for 15 years.

He thought he could use it all for good. He kept busy advocating for gun control and the nightmares that haunted his friends never came for him. Still, he watches as the ranks of people gunned down in mass shootings grow larger.

He woke up one night some 20 years after the shooting, and saw a ghost in the corner. Campbell at first blamed cataracts. But a doctor fixed his eyes and the figure stalked him still. Now 77, he believes the trauma finally caught up to him.

"I know it's not there, I know it's not a part of my life. There's no boogeyman," he said. "But I swear I saw it last night."

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John Barger carries his gun with him always — at work, at the store, at the movies.

When his children run out for milk, he hugs them and tells them he loves them, just in case. He trained them for the worst-case scenario: Know your exits; if you hear popping, start running and don't stop until you make it outside. He owns an assault rifle.

"Safety is an illusion," he said.

He was 18 years old, in his first semester of college, when his father was gunned down.

Barger never blamed the guns. His best memories with his father were of them hunting together. But he never hunted again. He didn't want to kill anymore. He trapped spiders in jars and dodged frogs on the highway.

"I can remember that ache," he said. "Then one day the ache is gone. It seems like you remember your whole world came down around you. And the next thing you know, the whole world's still moving. And I guess I've got to get up and go too."

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When they told Maryla White that her husband had been killed in a massacre, she'd laughed and said it wasn't true; that he always went to the Bargain Mart on Thursdays and he'd be home any minute. Then she went to the window to wait.

She remembers so little of the following years that she's considered undergoing hypnosis to bring it all back.

The family never talked about what had happened.

"I thought if we didn't talk about it, everything would be OK," she said. "And it wasn't."

Then one day, she decided she couldn't cry anymore. Her boys had been cross-country champions and her husband never missed a meet.

So she walked out to the sidewalk and took off.

She pounded out a little fear, a little fury with each stride. She ran until her legs collapsed. She felt, for the first time in years, a little hope. She got up the next morning and did it again. She ran and ran and ran, 20 mini-marathons in all.

"I didn't look back," she said. "I just kept going."