Living in the Age of School Shootings

By Serena Bennett

 

 

 

 

When I was in Kindergarten, they taught us about stranger danger. They taught us that a school is a safe place, and the bad people lay outside of it. In school, however, we are all friends.

When I was in second grade, we had our first school lockdown drill. I don’t recall why. I just remember being taught how to hide away from the doors in case someone came inside the school to hurt us. This was the first time I’d started to think that school may not be as safe as I had been told.

Sandy Hook

In December 2012, when I was in sixth grade, the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting occurred. I remember our English teacher sitting with us and crying, telling us all that she would keep us safe, and that it would be okay.

For the rest of that school year, we had frequent drills on how to hide in our classrooms. To turn out the lights. To not make a sound. To not leave or try to escape. To not trust someone if they knock on the door when you hide, even if they say they’re police.

This was a turning point. This made me understand that not only were schools not as safe as they appeared, but that the reality of school shootings was much bigger than our drills. There were innocent lives lost due to factors out of our control, and the only thing we could do was to stand in the corner and not breathe.

For me, this ventured beyond the “if” to the “when.”

After that, the drills became less frequent. I can’t remember the last time we had a serious lockdown drill. As the number of school shootings rose, the number of drills we had declined.

Maybe it became too real for everyone to bear, so we ignored the ever-present threat of the outside world coming inside?

Marjory Stoneman Douglas

After the most recent shooting, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting on Valentine’s Day 2018, the reality of it hit me hard.

I saw the footage in my Current Events class. This was the first time I had seen a video of an active shooting.

After hearing the students in the video scream and cry as the gunshots rang out in the background, I couldn’t help but become emotional. I felt terrified to see these students, these people just like the ones I sat with, scream with such fear in their voice.

I wasn’t sure how the rest of my class felt about this massacre that had happened in our own country, but I realized that these tragedies have become an almost common practice in our nation. It seems as if, since Kindergarten, we have been groomed to look this type of disaster in the face and keep quiet.

At Marjory Stoneman Douglas, the shooter had been a person they knew, a student from their school. Were the lectures we were given since age 5 pointless? Beyond stranger danger, should we not trust the people we know?

How to Respond to School Shootings?

When I’m asked what it’s like to be a student in a time when school shootings take place so often, I don’t really know how to respond.

This is what it’s been like for as long as I can remember. My classmates and I were born after the Columbine High School shooting in 1999. We have literally never lived in a world where this type of violence is not a threat.

We look at closets wondering if we could all fit inside, we look at corners wondering if they could conceal us all, and we look at our classmates wondering if it could ever happen to us.

Read how some local students have taken action
to help families in Parkland Florida.