CMS student: My friends and I should not have to feel afraid in our schools
My peers and I fear for our lives in school.
I’m a high school sophomore at North Mecklenburg High School, and on Sept. 8 news broke about the horrific shooting death of a 3-year-old boy after more than 150 shots were fired into his home while he slept.
On their own, headlines like this are distressing. But the fact that Charlotte police believe the suspects in this shooting are high school students connected to three local high schools, including the one I attend, is even more distressing.
The news left my parents and others reeling. They asked: Should I send my child off to one of the connected schools? Is it safe?
Then the Huntersville Police Department announced heightened security at two of the high schools in question. “We are aware of the threats that were made to two of our high schools in town, Hopewell and North Mecklenburg. We have had extra officers at the schools all week and will continue to have them there until there is no longer a threat,” the police department’s Tweet said.
That made parents’ questions feel even more urgent. But just how many people were willing to act on their concerns? A lot, it turns out.
On Sept. 9 only one of my classes had attendance of more than 50%. “The Square,” the bustling center of our campus, felt more like a tourist-trap ghost town. At lunch, the cafeteria was muffled both by fear and the plain lack of students.
You may be reading this and thinking that our fear was irrational. But the fear of gun violence in schools is very real and can be rationalized with significant quantitative evidence. Since 1970, there have been 1,316 school shootings in U.S. schools, and the rate is increasing. Eighteen percent of those shootings have happened since the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. CNN reported in 2019 that in the first 46 weeks of that year there had been 45 school shootings.
Even when a police department has not determined that there is a potentially elevated risk or threat to a local high school, as they did with mine, the fear of school shootings is commonplace. Pew Research found in 2018 that 57% of U.S. teens worry about shootings happening at their school. And the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey showed that 6.7% of high school students skipped school in 2017 because they feared for their safety.
My peers and I should not have to fear for our safety when we attend school. There is no good, excusable reason why there should be any possibility of a mass shooting occurring anywhere, least of all in an academic environment.
To the representatives in the U.S. federal government, I ask you: The next time you return to your district, will you tell the people you represent that you did all you could to stem gun violence in our schools?
Trying and failing to make change isn’t enough anymore — and current laws and regulations are insufficient to prevent gun violence of any sort.
Enacting policy to close gun loopholes, ban certain weapons, and improve enforcement by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives would substantially decrease the risk of shootings in schools, because decreasing teens’ access to firearms would help avert school shootings and make our schools a safer place.
We will not sit in our classrooms, complacent and docile as we fear for our lives. I don’t want my school to ever become a slaughterhouse, and change is urgently needed to prevent that outcome from occurring in any educational setting.
The idea that we are warranted in our fear of being shot at school is wrong. Real action will not right the wrong that has taken place in this country, but it can protect us and the next generation of children. We should not have to feel afraid in our schools.