Mass Shooting Generation
Children born into a nation of lockdowns and drills cry out for change.
PARKLAND, Florida — Delaney Tarr, a high school senior, cannot remember a time when she did not know about school shootings.
So when a fire alarm went off inside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and teachers began screaming “Code red!” as confused students ran in and out of classrooms, Ms. Tarr, 17, knew what to do. Run to the safest place in the classroom — in this case, a closet packed with 19 students and their teacher.
“I’ve been told these protocols for years,” she said. “My sister is in middle school — she’s 12 — and in elementary school, she had to do code red drills.”
This is life for the children of the mass shooting generation. They were born into a world reshaped by the 1999 attack at Columbine High School in Colorado, and grew up practicing active shooter drills and huddling through lockdowns. They talked about threats and safety steps with their parents and teachers. With friends, they wondered darkly whether it could happen at their own school, and who might do it.
Now, this generation is almost grown up. And when a gunman killed 14 students and three staff members on February 14 at Stoneman Douglas High, the first response of many was not to grieve in silence, but to speak out. Their urgent voices — in television interviews, on social media, even from inside a locked school office as they hid from the gunman — are now rising in the debate in America over gun violence in the aftermath of yet another school shooting.
While many politicians after the shooting were focused on mental health and safety, some students at Stoneman Douglas High showed no reluctance in drawing attention to gun control.
They called out politicians over Twitter, with a student telling Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican from nearby Miami, “YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND.” Shortly after the shooting, Cameron Kasky, a junior at the school, and a few friends started a “Never Again” campaign on Facebook that shared stories and perspectives from other students who survived the rampage.
On a day when the funerals of the shooting