It’s three in the morning. I’ve woken up, but I can’t fall asleep, because if I do then I know I will fall straight back into a frightening and familiar scene. If I close my eyes again, then I will be back within the walls of my middle school, the hustle and bustle replaced with a haunting silence, punctuated by the occasional muffled whimper and gunshots. And if I keep my eyes closed, then I will see my little sister, barely fourteen years old, bleeding out on the floor from bullet wounds riddling her tiny frame. When I gasp awake again, I will be alone in the darkness of my bedroom and my sister will be asleep next door.
In the United States of America, mass shootings are defined as having four or more casualties. I have never experienced a mass shooting, but that doesn’t stop me from dreaming about it more than I care to admit, more than I should have to. And I am not alone. As of May 21st, the 141st day of the year, there have been 231 mass shootings in America. In case you can’t do the math there, that’s more than one mass shooting per day. Of these, 26 happened in schools.
On April 5th at 12 PM, I walked out of my classroom with all seven of my classmates, making our way towards the football field where the Student Government Association had organized a school-wide walkout. We reached the stadium gates and were led down onto the track, where a girl handed us a sign made of construction paper, etched with the words “Schools are for LEARNING, NOT LOCKDOWNS” in bright purple marker. We hadn’t even completed a single lap around before we were ushered off the field and back to class, feeling as though we had never even left.
Let me make this very clear. This is not a rant about the SGA. Rather, I want to commend them for their efforts, for organizing a walkout, keeping it so orderly, even for the signs they made and handed out to each of us. It was not their fault that our so-called protest was a tightly controlled school affair, culminating in barely any action being raised at all. Stop me if I’m wrong, but the whole point of a protest is to rebel, to not follow the rules while making a (peaceful) statement. So why did we listen? Why didn’t we break the rules a little bit? Why didn’t we stay out of class a little longer and take a few more steps around the track? Why didn’t we care more?
To me, the most sickening thing about that day was not the fact that we didn’t get to stage a true, honest-to-god protest. The fact is that nearly every single student I passed on the way to the football field was not walking alongside me to go to a protest. They were walking because to them, this was a get-out-of-class-free card, and they played it. But after our moderated walkout, could you even blame them? Nothing about this was a protest. This was a group of students given little paper signs and allowed to walk a lap in the blazing sun, condensed into fifteen minutes spent out of class, but it was not a protest.
If you had asked me four years ago what my friends and I talked about, I would say that we had the kind of conversations you would expect a middle schooler to have. My friends and I would lose our minds over the newest season of Stranger Things, commiserate over the science test that we collectively failed, or even gossip about the rumours swirling around our history teacher and the pretty kindergarten teacher. Today, a number of the conversations I have center around whether or not we will be murdered today.
I can’t pinpoint the number of times it’s happened, but I can without a doubt say that it has happened too many times. It shouldn’t even have to happen at all, for God’s sake, but here we are. I am writing an article about gun violence in our schools and you’ve clicked on it, scrolling through my words on your screen. I don’t deserve to have to write about this. You don’t deserve to have to read about this. None of us deserve to have to let this occupy our minds and cloud our thoughts, but again, here we are. And I, for one, am so bone-tired of having no other option but to put up with it because “that’s just how things are.” No, it is not, and this country needs to stop pretending otherwise.
I’m nearly done here, so allow me to leave you with one thing. In March of 1996, the United Kingdom saw a gunman kill seventeen and injure fifteen at Dunblane Primary School. Since then, Britain has seen a truly shocking number of school shootings: zero. All I had to do was look up “UK school shooting” and I saw one, the only one. If I were to try that for America, if I were to type up “US school shooting,” I would get a Wikipedia list of all of the school shootings from this year alone. That is the difference between us and them. Not our food, not silly differences in our accents, not even the ocean between us. The difference is that they lost their children once and decided “never again,” while we continue to waffle back and forth and do nothing.
If you’re reading this and believe in lax gun control laws, sit tight for a second and listen to me for just a bit longer: this is not a difficult decision. As a country, it may be one of the easiest and best decisions we will ever make. And if it’s still too hard to make a choice, then put yourself in my shoes, and try to picture the fear and dread that grips my heart anytime my little sister is late coming home from school. It is always for some innocuous reason, like her bus broke down or there was hold up in the carpool line, anything. But my mind will always jump to that dream, and it will always see her there on the floor as I am forced to watch, helpless. At eighteen, I deserve to worry about college and end-of-year celebrations, about summer trips and silly crushes, about anything and everything except for this. I am begging you to let me worry about my eighteen-year-old woes and not the lives of my sister and every other child going to school in this country.
God bless America. Lord knows we need it. 🆅
The opinions expressed within this piece are solely the author's and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of North Mecklenburg High School or the Viking Voice.