The Unthinkable Reality

This post isn’t about guns. It’s about fear. It’s about change.

When I was growing up, I would sometimes hear about a threat made towards my school or one of the other two schools in my county. I remember that a few of my friends would stay home, but most people didn’t think much of it. I know I didn’t. I couldn’t understand why my friends would stay home because I honestly thought it was silly. I thought since we were in a small school and town, we’d be safe. Besides, school shootings weren’t even common. I wasn’t nervous in the slightest. An event that horrendous was “unthinkable”.

I thought I’d look back at 2006 – maybe I was just a naive child who was too sheltered from the violence. I would’ve been in 1st grade then. When considering only the mass shootings in which more than 2 people were killed/injured that took place on any kind of school, there was only one on record for that year. This does not go to say that there weren’t other school shootings, but when it comes to mass shootings there was only one that took place at a school. Other years had more, but overall, there weren’t what would be considered a significant number of incidents. It turns out, even though I was young, I was right to not be afraid. I didn’t have a lot of reason to be.

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I vividly remember my first moment of fear. It was the 5th grade. My teacher nonchalantly placed coverings over the window in our door and pulled the shades. We were suspicious, but when we asked if something was going on, she assured us she was just preparing for future reference.

A few hours later, she got a call. No intercom announcement. No sign of it being a drill. The school didn’t tell us it was fake. She told us to be quiet and lay flat in the corner. She turned off the lights and we all bunched closely together. Someone came to the door, rattled the handle, banged on it loudly, and yelled for us to let them in. As far as we knew, it was real.

I cried. I remember forcefully grasping the hand of the girl next to me and desperately begging her to pray, even though I knew she wasn’t religious. She must have been desperate too, because I witnessed her pray. I don’t remember exactly how long it went on for, but I’d have to say it was at least 30 minutes.

30 minutes of intense fear and vulnerability.

I understand why my school chose to do this – to prepare us for the worst – but it sparked my anxiety. And this anxiety never went away. When combined with the increase in incidents, it affected my education as I grew up.

Four years ago, I was a sophomore. A threat was made against my school. My parents woke me around midnight to give me the news, then told me it my choice – to stay home or to ignore the threat and attend school. I stayed up the entire night worrying about it and trying to decide what to do. I was nauseous.

It’s hard to think that 8 years before that, it wouldn’t have even been a conversation.

After a sleepless night, I decided I was simply too scared, and I stayed home from school without being sick for the first time in my life. It turns out, some 300 students stayed home that day too. Throughout the rest of high school, I found myself nervous every time I heard the intercom come on at an unexpected time or when I saw someone I didn’t recognize in the hallway. Basically, anytime anything out of the normal happened, I expected the worse. This fear created nightmares. I have these nightmares today, even though I’m in college now.

It shouldn’t be like that.

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It’s 2019. Threats are being made against schools across the country far too often, and many of these threats turn out to be credible. If you’ve seen the news at all, you already know that shootings have been happening much more frequently than they did in 2006. In fact, when using the same guidelines for the 2006 data, meaning someone was either hurt or killed, there have been 22 school shootings this year alone in the United States.

22. And there are still 5 months left in the year.

During my last year in high school, a very vague threat was posted about “SHS”. There was no information on which SHS, or even what state the threat was directed towards. Given that I, at the time, attended a school with that acronym, my school was on alert. Even though they determined the threat was not imminent for our school, there were several police offers from both the county and state on our campus.

This made me wonder why this much precaution isn’t taken every single day. This doesn’t go to say that my school didn’t put in any effort to keep us safe. There is set of doors to force visitors into the office, key card entrances, a resource officer present in the building, and bullet proof glass. Though all these safety features are nice additions, they’re certainly not enough. An even more nerve-wracking thought is that many other schools have even less security than my high school.

I won’t sit here and say that guns don’t kill people. That would be a lie. But, I don’t think guns are the issue that need to be addressed. What needs to be addressed is how the country is taking steps to protect students.

The simplest answer is that they aren’t.

Every school should have the safety features that my former school has, but they should also have much more. There are steps than can be taken to prevent mass shootings and save the lives of the children and teachers. Metal detectors, security streamed live to police stations, alert systems, well-practiced plans of action (more than just crowding behind desks, praying to whoever may listen), and materials for blockading doors and shielding students and teachers are just a few additions that come to my mind to make schools a safer place.

It’s painful, heavy on the heart and on the conscious, to consider all the lives that may have been saved if schools had a better security system and plan of action.

The high alert that a school is on after a shooting should be their level of alert every day.

Mourning parents and petrified students are crying, screaming to the leaders of America for a change. There are, as always, various opinions on what the change needs to be. When it comes down to it though, the solution lies within two words: protection and prevention. The question that I find myself asking our leaders is: How many school shootings does there have to be until enough is enough? As a student, I’m fearful towards what the answer could be. It seems that there is never a change in a school until a shooting has already occurred, and by then it’s too late.

So, why wait? Why take that risk? Make a change now. Demand a change now.

No student should be afraid to go to school. No teacher should be afraid to go to work. No parent should be afraid for their child to get an education. No school official should be afraid to be left to pick up the broken pieces from a problem they couldn’t solve because they lacked the funding or the support.

School is a place to learn, and I’m exhausted from the years I spent worrying when the intercom dinged in the middle of the day. The “unthinkable” has become a reality. My reality.

Everyone thinks it will never happen to them. Until it does.

I don’t have the answers. I just know the problem. So, in the words of DaShanne Stokes, “Violence isn't a Democrat or Republican problem. It's an American problem, requiring an American solution.”

Let’s solve it.