It was a Monday morning in early February and I was in math class. We were going over right-triangle trigonometry when an announcement came over the loudspeaker: “Lockdown drill!”
My peers and I knew what to do. My teacher barricaded and locked the door. We hid under our desks in complete silence. No one joked around.
After the drill we had an assembly to process our experiences. Intimidating questions were raised. Where do we escape to? Do we run, or do we hide? The whole meeting was surreal.
The most distressing moment of the meeting was when a faculty member mentioned that we will begin having lockdown drills as often as we have fire drills. The clear message that I learned that day: We must now accept that school shootings are as common as fires. A person going to a safe place like our school and murdering innocent children is as common as a natural disaster. I was completely overwhelmed.
Just a few days later, the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida occurred. For a while, I was grieving. I felt so much empathy for the victims’ friends and families who would now have to go on without their loved ones who deserved more time on this Earth.
Soon, though I hate to admit it, I felt myself growing numb. I was feeling so helpless. How could I, a 16-year-old, make a significant difference? So many mass shootings in my lifetime, and so many failed attempts at gun control to save lives. Will I ever live in a world where a school can just be a school? No guns, and no violence.
I grew more hopeless watching President Trump’s speech and press conference with the victim’s families. My heart broke as I saw Andrew Pollack discuss how he now had to visit his daughter at a cemetery.
My grief turned to anger at the suggestion that the solution is to arm teachers. It is was unfathomable to me how people could not see that now was the time for commonsense gun reform — not just because lives had so recently been lost but because lives have been continuously lost for far too long.
Hillel’s maxim “If not now, when?” came to mind. If my elected officials still refuse to make significant changes right after children have just been murdered, then would they ever make change?
But there was hope, too.
I watched the speeches by students from Stoneman Douglas who are fighting for a new conversation on gun control. I was moved by how articulate they were, and how they managed to channel their anger and grief into action, just days after their friends were murdered.
After seeing these speeches, I told myself that now there was no excuse to become numb. Action must be taken.
Days later, I went a conference that some of the teachers at my school organized. We discussed possible ways that the teachers could support a student protest if we so desired. The participants at that meeting agreed that we would march on Wednesday, March 14, during the nationwide school walkout for 17 minutes (for the 17 victims of the Parkland shooting).
During the meeting, I heard others who shared my feelings of powerlessness. Many of my peers shared how adults in positions of authority refuse to take teenagers seriously. However, I have come to the conclusion that if adults will not take us seriously, then my generation will make them take us seriously.
Through marches and lobbying for bills that we believe in, we will prove to those in doubt that we cannot be ignored.
So on March 14, I will walk out for 17 minutes to show my disgust for violence in schools, and the indifferent politicians who make it possible. And to those who say that I am too young or that I should wait for the adults to figure something out, I will share with you that verse from the Mishnah once more: “If not now, when?”
Will you protest in front of an FBI office?
You know I find it interesting. When I was a kid guns were so much more available than they are now. We had bullying and honest to goodness racism and gay bashing cause political correctness hasn’t become fashionable as of yet. And we had violence and fights in school that didn’t end up in expulsions and cops.
What we didn’t have was a general atmosphere of disrespect for one another. We didn’t have flame wars. We didn’t have social media where we labeled and ostracized each other. Our words and actions had consequences. And since we didn’t tune the world out with headphones and addictions to social media we actually paid attention to each other. You know in the real world. We took care of one another. We connected with one another. In the real world.
Maybe instead of blaming guns you might want to look at each other. Every one of these school shooters was first and foremost a troubled kid. Nobody was surprised that they were capable of doing these horrible things. Heck I read in the paper quote after quote where fellow classmates of the last shooter said they’d always thought he was capable of doing this. Joking about how he’d be the next shooter.
It was funny until he actually ended up doing it. I wonder if people actually joked about it with him. Or labeled him as that kind of guy? I wonder if his own classmates didn’t put the idea in his head.
You know who’ll do the next one. Or the guy whose most likely to.
Maybe you can stop the next one by befriending the angry guy who is feeling alienated. Connecting with him. Bringing him back from the brink. Probably doesn’t take that much.
Maybe its not the guns. Maybe its you.
Personally I’m not a gun guy. But like I said there were a lot more guns around when I was in school. And the guns haven’t changed. Maybe its you. Maybe people have changed.
But then its always easier to blame the guns. Keeps people from having to be responsible for each other.
“Maybe its not the guns. Maybe its you.” You should feel ashamed for enshrining your ignorance here. You are blaming the victims of school violence for not being *nice enough* to their murderer? Exchanging pleasantries during the school day does not lift people out of mental illness. As a point of fact, guns and assault weapons in particular have never been as attainable as they are now (https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2015/08/graphics-americas-guns). There are 200% more guns circulating in America than there were in the year 2000, a measurable upward trend in direct opposition to your casual observations about guns ‘back in your day’. Guns have changed. The world is always changing. The only thing frozen in time is you BS narrative of personal responsibility.
Yeah that pretty much well sums it up. Personal responsibility is a thing of the past.
And yes exchanging pleasantries and engaging with people suffering many dissociative disorders can help. As a matter of fact one I’m of the things hostage negotiators try to do is humanize the victims. What if people humanized themselves before they became victims?
Ill bet ya there are a lot of kids at that school that are wishing they’d have been nicer to that guy. Wondering if that thing they said or didn’t say set him off. Lots of teachers and principals and cops and neighbors and parents that’s saw the signs and did nothing cause it wasn’t their problem.
Yep you’re right personal responsibility is a thing of the past.
Maybe if instead of an angry orphaned white kid he was having trouble coping cause he was gay or transgender or a girl experiencing harassment or one of the myriad of people society now thinks as popular causes somebody might have taken an interest.
Heck he waved a huge red flag threatening a school shooting In line using his own name. It was seen by law enforcement and nothing was done.
But nobody did. Anything.
Yes personal responsibility is a thing of the past.
I get you don’t like guns. And you don’t like people that like guns. Im not a gun person myself and favor more regulation.
But this isn’t about guns.
In fact overall gun crime is down….except for mass shootings.
Draw a graph of mass shootings since 1900….since 1960…since 1980…since 2000 and then look at the incredible spike in the last three years. Unless you’ve got data on the supply of guns that tracks anywhere close to that graph your little stastic-which by the way is completely made up-has no bearing on mass shootings.
Its really sad that you use the murder of seventeen kids to advance your own political agenda.
Who knows if some other nut cooks off and kills like a hundred people you’ll get your wish.
But it won’t fix the problem….which is about mentally unstable people slipping through the cracks. More so its communities failing to pay attention to its own. And with as many guns as people out there as well as knives and bomb making stuff and cars as well as non assault firearms you’re not going to legislate yourself into safety.
ELOHEEM, did not instruct you to do any of that. so it is obvious you, are worshiping something or someone else in idolatry. giving your, bow to more of their hell and death as the enemy of ELOHEEM. just whose physical story of the physical creation, do you all think your here in again having failed twice before in the same ways? where mental rejection here in THEIR Story shall always result in hell and death, as THEIR enemies.
as if all,the pestilence, plague, and famine in the world today is not enough. you all, keep demanding physically more with your mental idolatry of men.