The land of the free and the home of the brave is a vital part of America’s national identity, but is there really freedom in fearing for your life every time you walk through the doors of your school building?
What is freeing or brave about fearing for your child’s life every time you drop them off at school or send them to the bus stop? Do parents ever think, “Today might be the last time that I say I love you to my child?”
The start of the school year in the United States also means new inventions, like bulletproof backpack inserts, new policies on how to get away from an active shooter being taught to classrooms of kindergarteners through seniors, and new lockdown drills that, in today’s age, everyone between the ages of 5 and 22 would recognize. A new academic year means new news stories breaking of young lives being brutally taken in the school building that was supposed to harbor learning and growth, but instead became a warzone.
Something unique that I share with many of my incoming classmates is that we were the same age as the children targeted at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut when the massacre that killed 26 people, including 20 children, in December 2012. I sometimes find myself thinking about the survivors who are graduating and heading to new beginnings just like I am, but with the weight of survivor’s guilt mounted upon their shoulders alongside their graduation gowns.
I also ask myself how we got here. The most recent shooting at Apalachee High School in Georgia was carried out by a 14-year-old and left 4 people dead. How do we get to the point where society just accepts that this is a problem we have to live with? Why has this allegedly become a “fact of life,” as Republican Vice Presidential nominee J.D Vance recently put it?
It has become a running gag, surely unintentionally, for legislators nationwide to respond to school shootings with “thoughts and prayers.” Thoughts and prayers for the families of victims, for the first responders injured, for the communities involved, but those who could make a change never seem to pull the trigger on it.
“Thoughts and prayers are not enough,” President Joe Biden said via X on September 5th, one day after the Apalachee High School shooting.
As society continues to stage its battles discussing and arguing over the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution, innocent lives continue to be ripped from the Earth. Whether this is the fault of a lack of gun reform or the fault of expensive and inaccessible mental health care, it continues to happen, and clearly, heightened security on school campuses nationwide is not cutting it.
In 2023 alone, there were over 600 mass shootings, according to the Gun Violence Archive (GVA). While the definition of a mass shooting is subjective and differs across news outlets, as well as other sources, GVA defines a mass shooting as “if four or more people are shot or killed in a single incident, not including the shooter, that incident is categorized as a mass shooting based purely on that numerical threshold.”
EducationWeek says that in 2023, their school shooting tracker, which includes all firearm-related injuries and deaths that occurred on the property of K-12 schools, counted 38 incidents. In 2024, that number is already up to 23.
During my last month or so of my senior year, my high school was the target of a swatting incident. As a crowd of us was herded into the auditorium from the cafeteria that morning, I was not really sure if I, or anyone else, would come out alive.
Social media exploded with speculations of there being a man in the building holding a student hostage with an AR-15-style rifle in a second-floor boys’ bathroom. When it turned out to be a hoax call, it was relieving, but this was the third time my school had been swatted while I was attending.
Most days, I really did not think about school shootings or the possibility of being murdered while walking through the hallway, but any time there was a loud noise I could not identify, any time there was talk of a threat being made, or any time there was a shooting in another part of the country that might inspire copycats, my anxiety spiked.
Shootings are much less common, although not unheard of, on college campuses. It is nothing short of strange, and almost dystopian, to know I went from being trained on how to run, hide, and fight a potential active shooter in my school building to walking across an open campus with thousands of people I have not and probably will never meet, yet feeling completely safe.
Other Western countries do not quite seem to have the struggle that America does, but is that what makes us so unique? Is that what makes us the greatest country in the world – school children being sent to die on a timeline that is uncertain and unpredictable?
I see no bravery, but rather cowardice, from the politicians and other leaders of this country who could do something. We cannot continue to accept this as a reality we cannot change. There is no freedom in growing up in fear of not coming home from school one day.