Between Aug. 21 and Sept. 2, only two weeks, there were 22 school shootings reported at college campuses across America. Thousands of students were forced to take shelter — like they had been taught to since kindergarten — yet, each of these 22 reports were fake. The tragedy here is not that these incidents were fake, it’s that for a moment, they were real.
Gun violence and school shootings are not new in this country. So far this year, only accounting for K-12, there have been 209 school shootings and 1,557 since 2020. This number grows when accounting for college campuses. That means that, on average, there have been three shootings every four days. When compared with 35 other countries of similar political and economic standing, Rockefeller Institute of Government reports that the US accounts for 76% of public mass shootings, despite making up only 33% of the combined population. Here in America, it has become more than a weekly occurrence, a predictable pattern like the weather.
Once you remove weekends, and breaks from the equation, the statistics grow even more horrifying, with three school shootings happening every two days for the last five years.
This, combined with the fact that gun violence is the leading cause of death for Gen Z, makes one thing clear — gun violence in America has become so institutionalized in our daily lives that it’s no longer a fear, but an expectation.
This issue is so common that American schools and institutions have abandoned the notion of revoking gun rights. Instead, we have chosen to embrace this violence in our lives. We now plan around shootings, rather than fighting against them.
American students are psychologically conditioned from the age of 5 or 6 to prepare for a school shooting. Students are told to hide in the least visible area of the room and lower the blinds, while their teachers turn off the lights and lock the door. Boys around my age have even gone as far as to fantasize about saving the school from the shooter, and being hailed as a hero.
By doing this, our schools have drilled two things into us from a young age: This is normal, and there’s nothing you can do to prevent this but hide and hope for the best.
The media further entrenches this normalcy within us. In any other country, no matter the death toll, a shooting of any kind would, and does, make national headlines. Investigations are launched, legislation is passed, and violence remains something far from normal.
Meanwhile, in the United States, gun violence and school shootings are so regular that the media fails to cover all of them. The New York Times, for example, has had to “raise the bar” in terms of what qualifies as a reportable story, and only report the most “heinous of shootings.”
This goes to show what little we are willing to do to try to solve this issue. Gun culture has been engrained in America since the founding of our country, and therefore issues like gun violence seem unavoidable.
Yet, just because we have been accustomed to something does not mean we can’t change it. Students have been at the forefront for social change for the history of the United States, and gun violence should be no exception.
We are affected more than anyone else in this country by this issue, and yet most students do nothing about it. This isn’t because students don’t care about gun violence; it’s because we feel powerless to do anything to stop it.
This isn’t a call for a national ban on all firearms sales. It’s a call for us, as students, to recognize this issue, to learn about it, to speak up. Because the less we are willing to do stop this, the more likely it becomes for the problem to only get worse.
The cost of this desensitization is far too high for us to continue doing nothing. Although the threats at the beginning of this year didn’t take any lives, they did reveal something to us: We already live as if the next shooting is an inevitability. We must realize that gun violence is not normal, and not inevitable, and since we are the ones at the end of the barrel, we are the ones who need to do something about it.
