While I was sitting at my High School graduation, do you know what my thoughts were? I’ll give you a hint, it wasn’t about what I was gonna do for the summer, or what decor I was going to buy for my dorm, or even about how happy I was to be surrounded by my friends and family. I was thinking, “I made it. I’ve gone from my first day of preschool to my last day of high school and I am still alive. I’ve made it through the most dangerous years of my life and nothing happened.” I had thought school shootings and mass shootings really only happened at primary and secondary schools, and I always thought that once I was out of high school, I was safe, that I wouldn’t die from a gunman invading my school.
I understood that as an American citizen, especially as a young woman, I would always have to be careful, and always have to worry about my safety. Yet, I thought my fear of being put in lockdown at school due to a gunman was behind me, that didn’t happen at college, right?
Most days during my town-provided education were not spent worrying about my safety. However, there were several days every year that I was forced to think of nothing but a possible threat to safety in school. I am grateful for the hours and days we spent training different lockdowns, shelter-in-place, and shooter drills, but it is still heartbreaking and utterly insane to me that kids as young as five have to train for this. It was disturbing and terrifying to me as a thirteen-year-old, and I genuinely can not imagine worrying about this at five.
I was lucky enough that the schools I went to never had any incidents (crazy that this is considered “lucky”), but we had different types of viable threats every year. There have been weapons brought into my middle school. There were gun threats every year. There were threats written on the bathroom wall. Yet, as a society, we have become numb to this. The school vetted the threats, realized there was nothing likely to happen, and then did nothing with the person who threatened our safety.
Shooter drills became normalized. Death threats were normalized. Threatening schools were normalized. Society normalized the constant threat to our safety at school and our fear of going in to learn, instead of doing something about it. It’s so tragic to me that this is our norm, and that making it to my high school graduation took a huge weight off my chest because I made it through school.
College students my age, who don’t live very far from me, being put in a position of locking down and living in fear of a shooter walking around is gut wrenching. It makes me feel like I did not make it safely out. I am still living in a nightmare where a gunman could come to my school and threaten my life any day.
My heart goes out to all those who are impacted by the Lewiston shooting as well as all who were impacted by any form of gun violence. However, those victims do not just need my heart. They do not just need our thoughts and prayers. They need a systemic change. There needs to be a change which prevents this from continuing on and harming so many lives.