Guns Kill Young People

A couple of years ago, researchers collected data on school violence around the world, studying every incident in which someone in a school was killed or a murder was attempted. They discovered fifty-seven incidents in thirty-six countries between 2000 and 2010. Nearly half of those incidents—twenty-eight—occurred in the United States. The United States had more incidents of school violence with a gun than Argentina, Australia, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, China, Denmark, England, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Hungary, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Latvia, the Netherlands, Northern Ireland, Norway, Poland, Russia, Scotland, South Africa, South Korea, Swaziland, Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago, and Yemen—combined.

That alone should blow our minds. In fact, American teenagers are eighty-two times more likely to die from a gun homicide than their international peers. As the number of young people killed in car accidents has declined in recent decades, the number of young people killed by guns has risen. Youth gun violence has now overtaken motor vehicle accidents as a leading cause of death for young people in the United States, second only to drug overdose.¹ American students, in other words, are living on the front lines of our nation’s gun problem; they deal with the consequences of weak laws every single day.

Just consider school lockdown drills—emergency exercises that have become as ubiquitous as chalkboards or lockers.

When I attended the March for Our Lives in Washington, DC, in March 2018, I asked students how it feels to undergo lockdown. What goes through their heads? How do they cope?

Children as young as seven years old told me about how they snuck over to one corner of the room and hid. Their teachers claimed they were preparing for a potential bear or some other animal entering the classroom.

Older students knew all too well for what they were training. Their reactions fell into two camps. Some described the fear and anguish they felt: the paranoia of not knowing whether the drill was real, the hope that they would never have to implement the skills they were learning. “Sadness pervades you for the rest of the day,” one student told me. “You just have to compartmentalize it and move on with your life.”

For others, the drills have become so routine, they no longer take them seriously. This feeling is best captured in the movie Eighth Grade, Bo Burnham’s uncomfortably realistic portrayal of middle school life in 2017. Thirteen-year-old Kayla, the main character, crawls over to her male love interest during a shooter drill, breaking protocol. In the dark, the two engage in a sarcastic conversation about overpowering a potential shooter. The rest of the students are too consumed by their phones to care or notice and once the lights come back on, and Kayla is not under her desk, the classroom teacher displays mild annoyance, but no real alarm. The drill is now just another mundane fact of school life.

Lauren Hogg, a survivor of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, described a similar nonchalant attitude toward lockdown drills in #NeverAgain: A New Generation Draws the Line, a book that she co-wrote with her brother, David, about the March for Our Lives movement. Hogg described how her schoolmates reacted when Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School went into lockdown as the shooting, which ultimately took seventeen lives, was unfolding.

“I was trying to run up the stairs as fast as I could, but all these juniors and seniors were like, ‘Stop running, guys, it’s fine,’” she writes. “When I was finally almost back to that classroom, I saw the librarians standing in the hallway, and all of a sudden their walkie-talkies were going off and they were listening to something, and then I just saw their faces go pale, and one librarian started screaming, ‘Code red! Code red! Everybody get back to your classrooms now!’ … And kids still thought it was a joke. They were laughing. That was how routine these drills had become. Or maybe it was more that the mind doesn’t want to believe what it doesn’t want to believe.”²

Laughter may indeed serve as a coping mechanism during moments of crisis. A staggering 57 percent of teens say they fear a school shooting, and since the mass murder at Columbine High School in April of 1999, over 215,000 students have experienced gun violence in some form at school.³

I am thirty-three years old. When I was in school, I never once worried about a school shooting nor did I ever undergo a mass-shooting drill. If you are twenty or younger, you have. The number of public schools that run active-shooter drills keeps climbing with each high-profile school shooting. Why? Because rather than making it more difficult for students to obtain firearms in the first place, we’re burdening students and school districts with the responsibility of avoiding the bullets once they leave the barrel of the gun.

In the 2003–2004 school year, the year I graduated from high school, fewer than 50 percent of public schools had some form of active-shooter drill. That number grew to 70 percent in December 2013, the year after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. It hovers somewhere around 95 percent today, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.⁴ Most students undergo one of two types of drills: a “code yellow” lockdown, wherein a teacher simply locks the door but otherwise keeps teaching uninterrupted, and a “code red” lockdown, in which teachers must do precisely what many did during the horrific school shootings in Parkland and Newtown—usher students away from windows and doors, turn off lights, and stay silent.⁵

In six states, students undergo more specific active-shooter drills based on the worst case scenario: a gunman with explicit intentions to murder. Often these drills involve local law enforcement and real guns.⁶ In some cases, police departments and school districts hire companies that bring in props, including fake blood and men in masks with plastic guns, to make sure everyone is prepared. This is a real-life mass-shooting role-play scenario we are designing for our children. To be an American student is to undergo an active-shooter lockdown drill, a concept entirely foreign to our Japanese, Canadian, British, or Australian counterparts.

Yet as horrific and traumatic as these drills can be, they do give me hope. The lockdown drills students undergo today are reminiscent of the duck-and-cover exercises that students of the 1950s and early 1960s performed in case the Soviet Union were to launch its handful of nuclear bombs against the United States. At the time, we believed that an attack could destroy major American cities but that rural areas of the country could potentially survive, particularly if Americans had some degree of training. Seven decades later, we are relying on similar drills to protect our youth from a domestic threat that we ourselves have created, not the actions of a foreign adversary whose behavior we cannot control. But if the duck-and-cover exercises of the Cold War era transformed students into antinuclear activists and inspired many to lead the social equality movements that dominated the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, including the civil rights movement, women’s liberation, and the push for LGBT equality, then students’ experiences with active-shooter drills today may be pushing an entire generation of advocates to fight for stricter gun controls.

In the aftermath of the Parkland shooting, young people took to the streets to advocate for gun safety and launched massive campaigns to register their peers to vote. They’re channeling their firsthand experiences with America’s broken gun laws into action that is forcing politicians to pay attention and transforming our national conversation about guns.⁷