Published: September 8, 2025
I remember my father talking about how he’ll always remember when the Challenger exploded and how his class was horrified while watching it happen on TV. Or how he remembers how he had just dropped my elder sister off at daycare when she was only a couple of months old, and he had learned about the Twin Towers.
When he or someone I knew talked about these tragic events, they would always say they hoped I wouldn’t have one of those milestones. I was roughly eight years old when Sandy Hook happened. I remember watching the news with my family, but I had absolutely no idea what was really going on. I had this vague idea in my head about what was happening, that people, including children, had died at this school. And I knew that it had something to do with guns. It didn’t click in my mind for a while that someone went into a school with a gun, with the intention to kill innocent people and children. It didn’t occur that something like that could happen to anyone.
I can’t remember the last time that I actually did a lockdown drill in school. After high school, it doesn’t really matter, apparently. Although I have absolutely no memory of even doing one of those drills in high school. I think the last time was in middle school. One of the most “laughable” memories I have of high school was when a student asked my senior year English teacher about it: “What would we do if a lockdown happened and we needed to escape?” The room had two doors and one window. The window looked out over the autobody garage, so you couldn’t really jump without dying. My English teacher looked his students dead in the eyes and said, “We would pile my desk, your desks, and the chairs in front of the doors. And if that doesn’t work, we’ll throw Caydince at them and run away.” I say that it was laughable because, sure, it sounded funny. But it also dawned on me that there was never a plan given to my teacher. He looked a little scared when he talked, even if he tried joking. It was as if he were trying to ease the fears in his students.
It makes me wonder how the students and teachers felt while they were in those classrooms. How the individuals at Sandy Hook, Annunciation Catholic School, and numerous other schools have been targeted. I will keep going, but I will leave the research up to you. In fact, while writing this, I found a “The Washington Post” article that has a timeline of all the school shootings since Columbine in 1999. It’s a rather sickening feeling, and I’m only writing about it. I haven’t known or loved anyone who has gone, or had someone go through something like this. I don’t know if anyone could ever handle something like this. And yet we have all these people who go through it, without any choice. This isn’t one of those “It just happens” moments. This is one of those moments where people in government are seeing gun violence becoming an unbearable burden on American citizens. And instead of allowing for better background checks or having no guns at all, they have schools practice tests and hope for a miracle that nothing happens. Not all schools do those tests; the last time I was required to do that was when I was eleven years old. Just a couple of years after Sandy Hook.
As a Criminology major, I believe that having more hoops for people to run through to get guns is important. Now I’m not sure how one does any of that, but there are experts, surely in the government, who can decide that they want to help Americans for once in their lives and figure that out. I saw a comment on a CNN Instagram post where someone said, “Not everything has to become political.” That comment was referring to the CNN coverage of the Mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, in the aftermath of the Annunciation Catholic School Shooting. But here’s the thing: school shootings are political. Maybe not the act in itself, but the reason someone owns a gun, is political. And if you don’t find the fact that innocent children, teachers, and school faculty are being injured or dying a political matter, then I don’t think I have very much hope in the future generations of America.
