Over the last year, students across the country have been consumed with the never-ending tragedies of a pandemic. But now, things appear to be returning back to normal (in some capacity).
But with this return to normalcy comes both the good and the bad. With schools and public places reopening, the once constant fear of school shootings that many students felt, will also be returning; something that many have not had anxieties about since before the pandemic.
After roughly a year without any large-scale mass shootings, there were two within six days of each other during March. The first occurred on March 16 when an armed man entered three Atlanta-area massage parlors, shooting and killing eight people, six of whom were Asian. Although the suspect claimed to not have racial motivations, many advocacy groups branded the attack as a hate crime against the Asian community.
Less than a week later, on March 22, ten people were killed in a mass shooting at a Boulder, Colorado grocery store. Though there was not a specific demographic theme in the victims of this shooting, the shock was just as apparent and the feelings of fear, anger and sadness that so many had once felt following these events returned.
The closeness of these shootings and their very typical aftermath brought back an all too familiar feeling for many students.
“Throughout all the cra— days isolated from people I loved and being unable to leave my house, school shootings eventually left my radar because fortunately, none were occurring. This peaceful bliss, however, came to an end after the shootings at Atlanta and Boulder in recent weeks,” Rockville High School junior Nick Schpiece said. “I have been reminded of the mental exhaustion I believe all students felt after watching the same cycle of school shooting, ‘thoughts and prayers,’ arguments like ‘there were good people on both sides,’ no action being taken and then another school shooting occurring.”
This “cycle” is one that has induced feelings of frustration in the past, leaving many hopeful that President Biden will hone in on the issue of gun control.
“While it’s unlikely that Biden will handle this issue fully — he’s taken more moderate, if not contrary, actual actions on his other campaign promises thus far — even doing a little bit of what he promised in his campaign would pave the way for future, hopefully fully adequate, measures for gun control,” Walter Johnson High School junior Sonya Meytin said.
Outside of gun control legislation enacted by the federal government, students and parents will be turning to school administration for ways to provide some feelings of security once schools officially reopen. In the past, MCPS has instituted regular lockdown drills and created occasional homeroom lessons on what to do if there was ever an intruder. But, some feel that this will not be enough, that schools will have to do more to prepare their students in the event of a shooting.
“I think that as soon as a majority of students within a given phase of returning to wholly in-person school have returned, schools should run school shooter drills or even just go over the barricade strategies, different exits and secure locations in different school buildings so that new students and ones that haven’t been in school for a while can either first learn or be reminded of what to do in case there is a shooter,” Meytin said.
Other students think that schools should do a better job of monitoring student activity outside of school to ensure that students are feeling more secure.
“I think schools should be more mindful of social media and student behavior. They should also be advertising their mental health services and their counseling departments and checking in with students and their mental health,” Walter Johnson junior Catherine Prado said.
And while the idea that schools’ may have to ramp up safety precautions is rather sad to some students, especially after a year of abnormality and change, it may be the only way to calm students’ anxieties in the short term. While gun control legislation is absolutely the only way to truly combat mass shootings, the polarizing nature of the topic has left Congress and the nation in general without any unifying gun control policy.
“We need gun control to re-emerge as a central issue in American politics. When two mass shootings can occur a week apart when most states are still partly quarantining, you know we have a real problem,” Schpiece said.
Article by Ruby Topalian of Walter Johnson High School