School shootings are all too familiar for anyone living in America. There’s hardly been a day of 2023 without children dying.
We send children to school, expecting safety, because that’s what school is all about. You learn, you socialize, you have time to be a kid.
Now, kids are scared to go to school and parents are scared to send their kids to school. Active shooter drills are the norm for kids across the country.
Why? There is no other country with the same amount of mass shootings, let alone school shootings. Many countries can go an entire year without one mass shooting recorded.
Why is nothing done to protect the most vulnerable age group in America? Not a single person in our government wants to be the one to say we need a change?
It’s only getting worse. The number of mass shootings in the United States has only been increasing. Guns are an epidemic in America that no one is doing anything about. There shouldn’t have to be a fear for parents or students about going to school.
By the end of March, America had 129 mass shootings in 2023. That’s more than the number of days in the year so far. Every single day, people are dying, being shot, losing family members, losing their children.
It’s a very scary feeling when you realize you’ve started to become desensitized to school shootings, to young children being gunned down in a classroom decorated with bulletproof glass on the door windows, and their bright crayon colored art hanging on the walls. It’s hard to continue to mourn shootings when you’re mourning a new shooting every day.
It starts to feel normal, almost like it doesn’t affect you. Until you remember you go to school everyday, your little sister goes to school everyday, the preschool kids you teach go to school everyday.
Even when I graduate, I’ll have two siblings in school until I’m 28 years old. I’ll be living with the anxiety of my baby sister not making it home for another 11 years.
The thought of a group of first graders huddled up in a corner hiding from someone trying to kill them, not understanding what’s happening, why they have to be quiet, hurts.
And it only happens in America. This isn’t the reality in any other first world country. From 2009 until 2019, there were 288 school shootings in the United States. The countries with the second most, Canada and France, had two.
In most countries, all it takes is one for immediate change, but change didn’t come after Columbine, after Sandy Hook, after Parkland, after Uvalde, I could go on.
“After a British gunman killed 16 people in 1987, the country banned semi automatic weapons like those he had used. It did the same with most handguns after a 1996 school shooting. It now has one of the lowest gun-related death rates in the developed world,” New York Times author, Max Fisher, wrote.
If other countries can do it, countries who aren’t having mass shootings nearly everyday, then why can’t we? Why is our government still trying to decide if it should protect the children of this country or protect the guns?