This is something that has been eating at me for a while. Mostly anger, but also just a confused mash of feelings that include sadness and frustration.
Trigger warnings for guns, lockdowns, a somewhat graphic description of gun violence, death scare.
We had a lockdown at my school recently. It was during lunch, so most kids were in the cafeteria. But I don’t like eating in the cafeteria because I don’t have anyone to sit with (I’m not lonely, don’t worry, also not the point of this story), so I was in a teacher’s classroom. She was out of the room, eating with a friend, but I was in there eating my own lunch, along with a couple of guys who were asleep in the back corner.
And then an alarm went off, the one that we knew meant lockdown. It could have been a drill, but that’s the thing: in my experience, when the real thing comes along, there’s something slightly different from the drill, because the folks in the front office can never be as prepared for the real deal as they are for drills. This time, no one came on the announcements to announce a lockdown before the alarm went off; it was just the alarm.
I had jumped to my feet as soon as the alarm started going, but I froze: I didn’t know what to do. The teacher was out. The boys were just starting to wake up, disoriented and confused. I realized then that my job was to do what the teachers do in a lockdown: open the door and let as many people in as I can. I went to the door and put my hand on the handle.
And then I stopped. Because for one terrified moment, it hit me that, if there was in fact a gunman standing outside this door, and I opened it, that I would be shot, without a doubt. I saw it clearly in my mind’s eye for a second, me opening the door and then a bullet hitting me in the chest. I’ll spare you the exact graphic details of my thoughts, but I was... scared.
I sent up a prayer and opened the door. There was no gunman. There was only my teacher hurrying down the hallway towards her classroom, and kids running. We got about twelve students in before she closed the door.
At the end of it all, when we finally knew what had happened, we discovered that we were safe; there had never been a shooting. Some idiot had posted a picture online of himself with a gun at school, and one of his friends had told admin. The SRO and police went to confront the idiot, and the idiot ran, so they called a lockdown to be safe.
And then... we went on to our next class. That was it. They explained it was okay and then sent us on, like nothing had happened. My next teacher gave us the exact same amount of classwork as normal, with no time to process or anything.
I had my moment, there in front of that door, but I think it must have been worse for those kids in the cafeteria. I heard stories from people who were in there, that adults were yelling at them to get under the tables, that teachers who were normally calm and collected had been panicking... that everyone in there knew, as well as you and I, that hiding several hundred students underneath cafeteria tables is about as good at protecting them from a shooter as having them stand in front of the gun with their hands on their heads. I’ve seen video from the cafeteria at that time, and I can see how scared everybody was. But hey, it wasn’t real in the end. So we go to class. Like normal.
This is not normal. This should not, under any circumstances at all, be considered normal. No, the danger was not as real as it could have been. But that doesn’t change how real it felt. I validly feared for my life, standing there with my hand on the door handle. Everyone in that cafeteria feared for their lives. We all felt that jolting, horrifying sense of our own vulnerability, knowing with a crashing helplessness how easy it would be to kill us. But no one got a chance to even process that trauma. Class, as always, must go on.
Every time there’s a lockdown drill, we’re never quite sure it’s a drill. No one tells us it’s coming, so every single time, there’s a tingle of fear as we go about responding to it. And every single time, I text my parents to let them know that this is happening, it is probably a drill, and I love them. I did that that day, and there was a sick feeling in my stomach as I sent messages to group chats that I’m in, telling them the same.
I’m sick of this being the norm in my country. I’m disgusted that this is so normal that a trauma like that--- kids seeing their teachers, usually so well-composed, panicking; kids crouched uselessly underneath revealing tables; kids texting their parents goodbye in case they die--- gets dismissed because it wasn’t really a shooting.
I know posts like this, that rant against the system, don’t really get much done. But I guess what I’m getting at is that we, the students, are so done with being traumatized. It got old real fast. When we talk about gun violence, this is the problem with certain points of view: the belief that there is a way to have both safety and highly dangerous weapons. That doesn’t work. If all the kids in your country (regardless of age) can hold a reasonable belief that someone will try to murder them someday while they’re at school, then you do not have gun safety.
I don’t think any of us have the “it can’t happen here” mentality, not anymore. It will happen here. The only question is when.
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