'I was not one bit surprised that it happened:' Shock over school shootings has turned to numbness
Daniel Gelillo glanced at his phone between taking Advanced Placement exams Friday morning when he saw that there was a shooting at a high school in Texas. His sadness quickly gave way to frustration - another school day in America, another school shooting.
"I was not one bit surprised that it happened," said Gelillo, a 17-year-old senior at Richard Montgomery High School in Rockville, Maryland. "I feel as, if we lived in a country where this wasn't the norm, time would stop. We would all be just in like a state of absolute and utter confusion and despair. But life goes on. That's just how it is here."
High school students have spent their entire educational lives participating in lockdown drills and walking into schoolhouse doors fortified with bulletproof glass. They remember the 20 elementary schoolers and six teachers gunned down in Connecticut in 2012, and now their phones buzz with news of school shootings as they sit in class. After absorbing school shooting after school shooting, there is a pervasive sense of numbness. The 10 people killed in Santa Fe High School on Friday are, tragically, another entry on the growing list of massacres that keep happening in schools.
While school shootings remain rare, it is no longer a matter of whether there will be another one in America; it is a matter of when and where. The reality has led to students sitting in class plotting how they would get out should someone start shooting, parents afraid to send their children to school and a resignation that nothing is likely to change any time soon.
"It's been happening everywhere," said Paige Curry, a student at Santa Fe High School who was asked by a reporter whether she ever thought that a shooting could not happen at her school. "I've always kind of felt like eventually it was going to happen here, too."
Since 13 people were killed in a massacre at Columbine High School in 1999, more than 214,000 students have been exposed to a school shooting at 216 schools nationwide, according to a Washington Post analysis. This year alone, there have been 16 school shootings, with 29 people dead.
This includes the shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, where 17 people were killed in February. Students started a wave of activism in its wake, marching in Washington for safer schools and gun control and starting the #NeverAgain movement to stop school shootings.
"It's so difficult to shout #NeverAgain with as much conviction when I am constantly losing hope for our country and our government," tweeted Carly Novell, who survived the Parkland shooting. "I can only say the same phrase so many times, but it keeps happening again and again and again and again . . . "
Gelillo remembers people talking about Columbine, which happened the year before he was born, and thinking it meant a word for something bad, but he was not sure what. He has memories of participating in lockdown drills in kindergarten but did not know why they were necessary until after the Connecticut shooting, which happened when he was in seventh grade.
"I've gone to school every day since then in fear of the possibility of staring down the barrel of a rifle, and I don't think I'm the only one that feels that way," he said.
Now he absorbs news of school shooting after school shooting: Parkland, a student killed at a high school in southern Maryland. There are also the close calls: an 18-year-old who brought a loaded gun to a high school near Gelillo's and who police said had weapons and tactical gear in his home. Gelillo said the wave of student activism after Parkland - in which he has participated, leading gun-control protests and school walkouts - gives him hope. He wants politicians to do something, whether it's making parents liable for improperly storing firearms or banning bump stocks, which approximate the firing speed of an automatic rifle.
Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo said he went to Santa Fe on Friday and encountered a shattered community. Acevedo, who argued that some gun-control measures should be put in place to prevent such shootings, said he hit "rock bottom" after the most recent attack.
"When you start hearing young people that go through this say 'I knew it could happen here, I'm not surprised it could happen here, I expect it could happen here,' it tells me that we failed," Acevedo said in an interview. "We failed as a nation; we failed as policymakers."
Sam Heidler, an 18-year-old senior at Richard Montgomery, said every time she walks into school, she thinks of the best way to get out should there be a shooter. She turned on her phone after taking a test on Friday morning and learned of the shooting in Texas.
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