THREAT OF GUN VIOLENCE TAKES TOLL ON STUDENTS
I was in first grade, living in San Diego on Dec. 14, 2012, when a man walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut with a semi-automatic rifle and two semi-automatic pistols and fired 154 shots, killing 20 first-graders and six adults.
I will never forget that story as it’s engraved in my mind. Afterwards, my parents talked to me about the incident, and I processed the fear I suddenly felt.
To ease my fear, we came up with a plan for where I would go to get away if I ever felt unsafe at school or heard gunshots. I had the plan all worked out in my head; I would run through the grass behind the school, staying off the street, until I was out of danger.
After what happened in Connecticut, I never wanted to hide in school quietly waiting for my classroom door to open.
I moved to a new school in third grade, and it had lockdown drills to prepare us for what we would do if a dangerous unauthorized person was on campus. We learned how to react if a fire alarm was pulled — and what we needed to hear before believing it was an actual fire and not a shooter tricking us into the open.
Again, school staff members talked about turning the lights off and sheltering in place while I secretly strategized how I would escape.
When you’re young, you don’t realize how this constant state of fear and feeling unsafe is affecting you. It’s just a part of life. But now I’m a junior in high school, and I have grown up in the era of school shootings.
There have been hundreds of school shootings since the Sandy Hook shooting more than 10 years ago, leaving a host of mental health issues and destroyed lives in their wake. While a lot of adults and politicians are debating which guns are the right guns for people to own, too few are addressing the silent victims quietly suffering from anxiety and fear.
The gun debate has been going on for decades, and we are no closer to a solution. The political divide is getting bigger, not smaller. Politicians talk about the Founding Fathers and what they intended with the Second Amendment that gave Americans the right to bear arms. It’s important to remember that the only guns that existed in 1791 were single-shot muskets, rifles and pistols that were slow to reload. Did our Founding Fathers envision a future where guns were automated, capable of firing hundreds of rounds in minutes? If they did, would they have given every American the right to bear arms?
We can’t wait for politicians to agree on this issue. My generation is on the front lines, suffering visible and invisible damage. It’s shaping who we are and who we will become. Anxiety and fear should not be a part of our education. Volumes of research cover the mental health of shooters, but what about the rest of us? Even kids who have not experienced a school shooting firsthand — but are so often exposed to media coverage about them — feel like it’s only a matter of time before this happens at their school. We feel overwhelmed and helpless.
A 2021 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association explored the mental health of students without firsthand exposure to a school shooting. Researchers surveyed 2,263 Los Angeles 11th- and 12th-graders about their fear of school shootings and violence at their school and found that students who had greater concern about school violence or shootings had increased odds of reporting generalized anxiety and panic symptoms six months later. This indicated that children internalize their fears, leading to recognizable mental health problems. The study found that “even when children aren’t directly involved in school shootings, they are deeply affected by them and often experience anxiety and depression as a result.”
These fears stay present in our minds as kids my age watch frightening reenactments on YouTube of realistic scenarios that depict school shootings. The short videos are terrifying as they allow us to imagine how this would feel if it happened to us. If you haven’t seen any of these, you must.
To make matters worse, laws in 32 states allow teachers to carry guns with permission from the school, according to the U.S. Concealed Carry Association. But can armed teachers save lives? A study published this month by Giffords Law Center found that arming teachers can make schools less safe. According to Gifford Law, there have been nearly 100 publicly reported incidents of mishandled guns at schools in the last five years resulting in unintentional injuries to staff or someone else.
Nearly every student I know has a fear about school shootings. We are the silent, faceless, collateral damage growing up in a world where fear and anxiety are a part of our everyday school experience. We must do better!
It isn’t legal to own hand grenades because everyone understands that military weapons would get a lot of people killed. So why is it OK to own semi-automatic guns? Lawmakers and others who debate and defend gun rights need to understand the impact gun violence is having on the mental health of my generation.