School shootings spur real-time reaction, survivor support

“My school is being shot up and I am locked inside.”

The scared student’s tweet was jarring, but what really grabbed Britnee Webb as she scrolled through Twitter were the accompanying photos, taken from the floor and shared live as students hid along a wall and under desks at their Florida school.

Webb flashed back 11 years, remembering how it felt to crouch beneath a table, to wait for police for what felt like forever, hoping the gunshots didn’t get closer. Now this boy would know that feeling too. She wanted him to know he wasn’t alone.

“I’ve survived this,” she tweeted to him, a social-media hug from 2,000 miles away in Salt Lake City. “You’re gonna be okay. Hang in there sweetie. Stay quiet. Help anyone who is hurt. Stay calm. It’s going to be okay.”

She couldn’t know that, of course. It had been 24 minutes since he tweeted. Was he OK?

At best, he and the 3,000plus Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students would endure an involuntary initiation into the continually growing legion of people who have survived deadly mass shootings in the U.S.

Throngs added to the group in the past 20 years include 22,000 festival attendees in Las Vegas last year, hundreds at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub in 2016, and before that, people from San Bernardino, California; Aurora, Colorado; the Washington Navy Yard; Sandy Hook; Chardon, Ohio; Virginia Tech, and more.

Each instance spurred public sympathy, support from other survivors and calls for action and activism — a script that modern technology has accelerated into real-time reaction as such events are still unfolding.

After a Georgia high school teacher barricaded himself in a classroom last week and fired a shot toward a window, multiple students quickly tweeted calls for more gun control and criticized the idea of arming educators.

“My favorite teacher at Dalton high school just blockaded his door and proceeded to shoot. We had to run out the back of the school in the rain. Students were being trampled and screaming. I dare you to tell me arming teachers will make us safe,” Chondi Chastain said in a tweet directed at the National Rifle Association that was retweeted 15,000 times within hours.