In the past few years, America has suffered from countless amounts of mass shootings, ranging from elementary schools to college campuses. As these tragedies increased, so did the effects on students, teachers and communities, with an increased fear of schools and a worry for the country’s gun control. Guns have been one of the leading causes for deaths in American children and teenagers, with one in ten gun deaths occurring in people younger than nineteen. Over 338,000 students have experienced gun violence since the 1999 shooting in Columbine. April 2022, during Mendocino High Schools Alternative Education Week, my group had just gotten back from Fort Bragg Hospital where we were learning about the hospital’s procedures for many kinds of incidents. While back on campus we suddenly all got told to go into two classrooms, when we all asked what was going on we were told Fort Bragg High School had an active shooter. All of us were pretty terrified at this time, some of us had no idea what was happening, while others were texting friends and family who went to Fort Bragg. Seeing how scared just the threat of one shooting caused us to be made me curious to see exactly how much fear this is instilling in generations of students and their parents. 

 I decided to speak with some peers, as well as an adult who went to school in a much larger location than Mendocino on the topic of school shootings. One student I spoke with, David, a senior at Mendocino, stated that, “Yes, during AE week, we were doing electronics; the college tour kids were at our class, and we were told there was a shooting at Fort Bragg School.” He went on to talk about how it ended up being a fake call in to the school, but how the fear the students were feeling was very real. There were roughly ten or twelve students in two conjoined classrooms at the time, to make matters worse for these students, their friends in Fort Bragg had been texting them and saying that they heard shots going off.  Some of us were even told by our friends there that the shooter was in one of the English classes and that there were shots fired. The year 2023 had a total of 631 school shootings, and fortunately for us this one was fake, although 2021 does hold the record for most shootings in one year, this being 689. These recent shootings, and high school shootings, are not the only ones to happen though. I talked with another senior at the highschool, who spoke about a threat at his middle school when he was about five. The senior I spoke with, Angelino, shared this: “There was someone who had, like, shot his parents and had been roaming around campus behind the school, and they thought he would come onto the school because he had been posting about it on social media.” He also mentioned other lockdowns, none that he remembered as vividly as this one. He remembers not going back to school the next week, as did a lot of students, due to being scared of going back. 

A key contributing factor to these tragedies is the safety of homes and school campuses; an estimated 4.6 million American kids live in homes with loaded and unlocked guns. The Secret Service and Department of Education revealed that about 93% of school shooters plan their attack in advance, and another factor to this is that in 80% of shootings there is at least one kid who knew about it beforehand, and did not report it. When talking with my peers about this struggle on gun control in America, most, if not all of them, said that there needed to be better gun control. My classmate, Angelino, even said that “I would be okay with, like, banning guns on a whole scale, like the U.K.” What he was talking about was that depending on the licensing you have, most members of the public can own shotguns and rifles in the U.K, but handguns have been banned since the Dunblane School Massacre in 1996. The Dunblane School Massacre was at a primary school in Scotland; this resulted in sixteen kids dead, one teacher dead, and fifteen other children injured. Similarly, David and Quentin who are both seniors, both said there should be more preparations for people who want to buy guns. Quentin mentioned that more in-depth mental health checks, as well as making sure that person has a lockable place to put it should be mandatory. David, the other senior I spoke with, said, “I recommend just putting that gun somewhere your kids cannot reach, or cannot ever know about; just never tell your kid about the gun.” He also mentioned that when it comes to hunting, you should have a place to hold your gun that you have to check out during hunting season, then back in when the season is over. 

For a pretty terrifying reality check, there have been almost eighty school shootings in just 2023, with over one hundred people either dead or injured. Uvalde has been one of the most recent ones, resulting in nineteen elementary students losing their lives, as well as two educators. There have been so many over the years in so many different age groups. Columbine was a high school massacre where fifteen people died and was considered the worst shooting up until Uvalde.  Shootings don’t only happen at highschools, and while it isn’t the most prominent one for colleges, one that I’ve wanted to mention is the University of North Carolina Shooting. The UNC Charlotte shooting is not classified as a mass shooting because twenty-one year old Riley Howell charged the gunman who entered his lecture hall and had begun firing inside. There was one other student who was killed, and multiple others injured, but police did say that Howell saved many people’s lives by sacrificing his own. 

While discussing this sensitive topic of mass shootings, I got very emotional responses. Angelino went on to say, “It’s egregious, it’s horrendous, it’s one of the worst displays of human nature, and I think humans have been killing themselves and others for hundreds of years and as we evolve those do too.” He referred to it as a “Different type of hate,” mentioning that people just want to take their rage out, and this is the best way they see to do that. David had a similar perspective on this topic as well, saying “I feel what is wrong with people, why do they have to go to those lengths, why do they have to take other people’s lives to satisfy their own or to justify something they feel, no other lives should be taken because you’re feeling a certain way.” All of them held so much sympathy and emotion for the victims and families of these shootings. The emotion simply in these students’ voices is something I can’t properly describe. Something else David said really stuck out to me, stating that “Their lives were taken from them, they can’t experience anything in the future, they were taken too early from the world, and it’s stupid.” He also said that when there is a huge tragedy that happens at a school, to people of similar age as him, he just sits there for a second and realizes that could have been him and his friends.

Instead of focusing solely on the perspective of students, I also interviewed a parent, someone who went to a much larger school than Mendocino, and had three kids go to Mendocino. She went to a school much different from Mendocino; in her graduating class there were almost 400 people. So when she went to her first graduation at Mendocino, she expected a big stadium, with security and even metal detectors. Instead she found thirty students on a stage in a gym. When talking to her about the mass shootings in schools, she shared this: “I don’t think that you can eliminate any school from the list of where a possible shooting could happen, the reasoning behind shootings and the societal issues that lead to shootings are everywhere.”  She told me she is genuinely scared for her kids’ lives every day they go to school, and that it has been like that since her oldest started at school. 

Addressing this terrifying issue in our society today is going to take many resources, from better gun control, improved mental health support, and more community involvement. As a final question, I decided to ask my peers if they felt past and current shootings are instilling fear in generations of kids. The results are probably what you would expect, Angelino shared, “Yes, I have witnessed kids fear coming to school, especially after the Columbine Mass Shooting, I was in school then, kids thought it would be a widespread thing, and we were just really scared.” Even Christine, the mother I interviewed told me her views on this, her views being, “Absolutely, I absolutely believe that the younger generations are choosing not to have children, they are choosing not to bring new life into a world that is so unsure and unforgiving.” David and Quentin both said something along the lines of believing that kids who go to larger schools are more likely to be scared, than the ones who go to Mendocino or schools like it. While some schools are implementing things to help save students, things like bullet proof windows or even getting security guards, these disasters are still happening. One of the last quotes I want to bring up is another by Christine. When I spoke to her about these bulletproof windows being put into some schools, this was her response, “Bullet resistant, nothing’s bullet proof.” She went on to mention that having tempered windows would be a better way to prepare schools, but there is no way to make anything bullet proof. Generations of children and their parents who have dealt with this same crisis themselves are scared. Kids are scared to go somewhere they are supposed to be safe and are supposed to be able to learn, and parents are scared to send them there. 

Sandy Hook Promise. “17 Facts About Gun Violence and School Shootings.” Sandy Hook Promise, 6 Dec. 2023, www.sandyhookpromise.org/blog/gun-violence/facts-about-gun-violence-and-school-shootings.

Carlisle, Madeleine. “UNC Charlotte Student Riley Howell, Who Died Saving Classmates From Gunman, Honored as Jedi Master in New Star Wars Book.” Time, 30 Apr. 2021, time.com/5755064/riley-howell-shooting-hero-star-wars-jedi.

“School Shootings in the US: Fast Facts.” CNN, Alex Leeds Mathews, Dec. 2023, www.cnn.com/2023/09/22/us/school-shootings-fast-facts-dg/index.html. Accessed 7 Dec. 2023.