Do any other american high schoolers have intense survivor’s guilt and trauma with school shootings even though they weren’t at your school?
Like. A laser tag place opened geared towards teenagers and it got no business, we tried to enjoy it but when someone pointed a laser machine gun at me and I instinctively dropped behind the nearest wall and reached to turn off my phone I cried, I wasn’t the only one. The announcements system turns on at an unexpected time and everyone holds their breath until they say something besides “locks, lights, out of sight,” nobody even jokingly pops chip bags anymore, a door slammed really loud during a class change and everyone dropped and ran. Everyone cries during drills, even the toughest ranch kids. Every drill comes with a full day of teachers crying and telling us that they love us all so much and will die for us, and every kid in every class looking around wondering who would I die for? Who would die for me? You walk to the bathroom and wonder every second if it happens right now, where will I go? You test supply closet doors to see which ones are unlocked, you memorize which furniture in the teachers’ lounge your English teacher says is light enough to barricade a door with. The fire alarm goes off and nobody moves, instead you wait for gunshots—it a trap? You stand with a group of freshmen and realize that you’re the oldest, you know you’ll have to die for them. You forget your ID tag and worry that now the police won’t be able to tell your parents if you’re safe, or not safe. Your stats teacher has a baseball bat by the door, your math teacher keeps a stapler under each desk to throw, your drama teacher asks who will be willing to stand by the non-locking door with the Shakespearean swords. Your yearbook teacher tells you don’t worry about breaking a camera because you heard about the kids who died holding them. You don’t use the bathroom during classes because you don’t want to be the only target to shoot at. You keep your phone on silent 24/7 because you worry the one time you forget will be when you get your whole US History class killed. You have a snap saved with your class schedule and school and full name to send in an instant to your internet friends so they know if you were on that wing, you have a note saved with the things you want your mom to know and the things you’re sorry for. At the age of 12 I was told I needed to know who I would die for and that it was okay if it was nobody, that was my decision to make. School shootings control us more than adults and non-Americans could possibly imagine and nobody moves to change anything unless we’re actively screaming for it. Have you considered we’re too scared?
The absolute fuck. The fuck did I just read. This sounds like dystopian fiction. The fucking fuck.
It isn’t. This is 100% the reality of all American children - not the ones that live in bad neighborhoods, not the ones that make bad choices, ALL OF THEM.
Welcome to America.
I just realized it’s not normal to go through “if anything life-threatening were to happen how would i react” scenarios on the daily.
Like I had this one creative writing class, and we did little warm-ups each day, right? And I forget what the prompt was, but I just scrawled out a scenario where a shooter busted into church and someone (in first-person) had to smack ‘em upside the head with a frying pan from the nearby kitchen before they could shoot up the entire congregation.
I got a perfect score for something I’ve run through in my head a thousand times, tweaking little details here and there on occasion. What if I’m at school? What if I’m going to the bathroom? What if I’m helping my brother to the bathroom? What if they’ve already shot people? What if they’ve already shot me?
But At Least People Can Keep Their Guns, Right?
And the doors that lock and the teachers that get locked out and we aren’t supposed to let anyone in but that guy SAYS they’re a teacher and LOOKS like a teacher and might get mad if you don’t open the door for them. But if you do what if they AREN’T, and you just got those kids in the chemistry room next to the door killed? And you have to size the guy up like “COULD he be carrying a gun” and if you let him in you spend the rest of the school day terrified that you were the one who caused the next school shooting. And if you DON’T let him in you see him in the halls later and someone says “Hi Mr. ______!” and it’s time to avoid him for the rest of your four years in high school because YOU LEFT HIM LOCKED OUT BECAUSE YOU THOUGHT HE COULD KILL YOU.
And the woman at the lonely desk in the front lobby who checks everyone in, everyone, except at the beginning of the day when everyone all comes in at once. And you have to live with the fact that you’ve seen her miss people while checking in others, because we’re kids and impatient to get to class one time and sometimes we just walk past - and are we setting a precedent that’s going to get us all killed? Is this teacher or secretary or hall monitor just going to get shot anyway, before the rest of us, so the killer can come in? Does she KNOW, for SURE, that that kid who walked past is a student? And anyway, it won’t save us, because they don’t check the bags or anything, so if the shooter IS a student they can just check right in!
And you used to be friends with the weird kid because he liked the same music as you, and now you have to careful weigh whether that makes YOU responsible. Do you have to keep being his friend so maybe you all graduate alive, even if he has a camouflage hat and his dad was probably in the military and he listens to edgy music and he talks about weapons all the time and you know he has a gun at home? Will being friends with him save you, or if you slip up once, make him mad, don’t sit with him at lunch, say something teenagers say about each other when you think he isn’t listening, are you a walking ghost? Are your days numbered? If you’re a girl (I am), you’re even more terrified, because WHAT IF HE ASKS YOU OUT? You don’t like him that way. Will he kill you if you say no?
You stop sitting with the weird kid. You live with the guilt of knowing maybe this was the last straw. He doesn’t shoot up the school. He was okay in the end, and you’re still guilty… and you’re still scared.
You go over to a friend’s house. At one point, everyone takes a break and plays with bb guns. It’s the first time you’ve seen a gun in real life. You’re the first to get shot. It hurts more than you thought it would - they shot you on the side of the neck. You wonder if they were lucky, or if they know how to aim. You don’t know if there’s a real gun somewhere in the house. Later, weeks, months later, you two have a falling out. You’re terrified for the rest of high school.
And instead of the anti-bullying talks from middle school you have lockout-lockdown drills, and they come and pound on the doors to see if anyone opens them, and in some schools they have the good courtesy to tell you it’s a drill so you aren’t crying, except then… then you have to wonder if your sobs would have given you away. Except they wouldn’t have - you’re a quiet crier, but what about the kid next to you who screamed at a physics demonstration last week, what if it wasn’t a drill and you heard pounding at the door, would she scream?
Can you fit under that closet shelf? Can you fit into that chemistry cabinet, if you move the scales out, first? You can’t try in class. The teacher doesn’t have time for that. You want to, though. You want to KNOW if you could close yourself into that tiny space that locks when it shuts all the way and wait. Maybe you wouldn’t suffocate, it has cracks at the edges after all. You don’t think you’re claustrophobic. You don’t think you’ll scream.
Nobody shoots up your school. You graduate. You go to college. Someone sets off a firework near one of the dorms - not yours, but a friends - and the groupchat is alive with the not-so-fun, never-fun game of “fireworks or gunshots” with the stakes being your lives. You all decide, “fireworks.” If you were wrong…
A friend breaks up with someone and you spend a little time wondering what you would do if they broke into the dorm while you were hanging out. Would you die for them? Sometimes you decide no, sometimes you decide yes. You aren’t sure which turns your stomach inside out the most. You had a dream about a school shooter asking who would be the first to die. You didn’t volunteer. They picked you anyway.
Two years after you graduate, your school gets a threat. Police search it. The kids are locked in rooms for hours. Four hours, five. You imagine it. They wouldn’t have said it was a drill on the loudspeakers, that time. Police WOULD have opened the door to your classroom, because they were searching room-by-room. Would you have screamed? Five hours without food or water or being able to go to the bathroom. Some people had to pee in the trash cans. In a dark room in front of their classmates. Your friend’s school has cops with guns in it now. It didn’t when they graduated, and you weren’t there for the not-a-drill… but they were fears both of you had, two fears out of hundreds. Just because you weren’t there when they happened doesn’t mean they didn’t feel like a rope around your neck.
The newspaper article interviews a student and you find out the kids thought it was an active shooter. They didn’t know it was a note. Doors slammed. Lockers slammed. The police were searching the school, there was a lot of slamming. How many of those slams sounded like gunshots?
Do you have a right to feel this way, since it didn’t ever happen to you? Every lockdown was a drill for you. Does that matter? You know the part of your brain asking isn’t a part you should listen to, but it doesn’t matter. Half the adults say you’re overreacting, or that it isn’t being caused by guns, but by bullying or just teenagers being teenagers or mental health or something, ANYTHING, that’s YOUR FAULT instead of theirs.
Let me reiterate that.
HALF THE ADULTS ARE SAYING SCHOOL SHOOTINGS ARE YOUR FAULT.
And you remember that you stopped sitting with the weird kid, and you wonder if that’s true. And then you remember not letting that one teacher in once, and you wonder if they blame you, if they were the half of adults that would never understand the fear you felt in that instant.
And it follows you, this fear and these events and the news from home and the flinch when someone slams a door. But you’re the adult now, you’re out of high school, and so the kids are yelling at YOU when they say “DO SOMETHING, WE’RE DYING!” At least, in your mind, they are. Even though you aren’t out of college, even though it’s the older people who did this, you feel like you are to blame BECAUSE YOU DIDN’T DIE. Because the weird kid DIDN’T shoot up the school. Because the teacher WASN’T a murderer, because the lady at the front desk DIDN’T get killed, because you never sat for five hours in a dark classroom thinking you were about to die. It’s your fault now, because you graduated, that part of your brain says. And it takes a tumblr post to tell you that that’s survivor’s guilt. That it’s trauma.
You still have the school shooter dreams. You think you always will.
They’re nothing next to reality.
My friend and I were in a chemical closet with a few other kids during a lock down due to a nearby shooter. The girl next to me was laying against my chest and having a panic attack, the kid in the corner was hurrdily texting his mother how much he loves her and how he’s sorry he forgot to rinse off his dishes that morning. My friend and I silently looked at each other and nodded, promising silently that we would protect each other until the last bullets fell if they even did at all.
When the staff came over the loudspeakers and said the nearby shooter had been apprehended, everyone fell out of cabinets and from under tables and out of lockers sobbing and grabbing eachother….it was surreal and haunts me until this day.
We were fucking /scared/. We are fucking scared to this day, because shootings don’t end in high schools. Shootings happen on college campuses, in libraries, in churches, synagogues, mosques, in people’s childhood neighborhoods.
We had a lockdown once in my freshman year. We sat on the floor for an hour, one of my friends crying, two of us telling him it was just a drill, telling ourselves it was just a drill. We looked at the teachers, they didn’t know. We knew it wasn’t just a drill. The teachers finally tell us we can use our phones. We all get on social media. It wasn’t a drill. There was an active shooter at the University a couple blocks down. We sat, we waited. We told ourselves the shooter couldn’t have gotten here before the lockdown. He could have. It took another hour before he was caught. Another hour of sitting on the floor, another hour of crying, another hour of not knowing. There wasn’t a shooting at my school.
My junior year, my last year, we heard a banging noise. It didn’t quite sound like a gunshot, but we weren’t sure. Then the lockdown announcement came over the intercom. The banging kept happening. Our teacher left the room to tell the substitute a floor above us what to do. We we’re quiet, waiting for him to come back. Or not. The banging kept happening. He came back. The banging stopped. The lockdown stopped. Some kids were messing with a metal door. There wasn’t a shooting at my school.
The school hosted a party after graduation. Some of us were too scared to go. We didn’t want to be scared any more. I went. Nothing happened.
I used to love storms, now I’m scared of thunder. It sounds too much like gunshots. My brothers who were homeschooled don’t understand why I hate even looking at guns. I’m in University now, and I still look in my classrooms. What would I do if it happened now? Some of my friends are still in high school. I can’t say goodbye to them anymore. I don’t want it to be the last time.
I have PTSD from my brother trying to kill me, but the trauma I experienced in the American school system hurts me more. Because when you go through it daily for years, everything reminds you of the times you thought you were going to die.
I graduated a while ago, just when these things were starting to, unfortunately, become more common. For me, drills were always a boring moment during homeroom and a time to try and sit close to your crush. We were all totally desensitized to the situation we were supposed to be preparing for. Even the teachers would get annoyed about the disruption sometimes.
It is absolutely heartbreaking that this isn’t the case anymore. Reading these reactions to drills just shows how quickly this changed. I graduated 3 years ago. In 3 years, this has become so common and reoccurring that even drills are traumatic. It also pisses me off because something should’ve been done about this shit already. But no. El boboso naranjo is stuck in the fucking NRA’s pocket.
I hope this suffering will end with the next administration and I would say go out and vote, but the thousand people who have already put their name in the basket need to figure their shit out and stand behind a single, strong candidate before that happens.
I want this carved into the face of every executive of the NRA, and every politician they’ve bought.
This is fucking heartbreaking,
I was in high school when the Columbine shooting happened, I went to public school in Colorado. I knew people who lost friends in the shooting. The social fall out right after was bizarre for all us kids who were designated “other”. Bullies tearfully (fearfully) apologized to trench coat wearing friends, begging them to not kill them. While at the same time, incidents bullying INCREASED because we all-black wearing weirdos were seen as compatriots of the shooters. I graduated before what was described above became the norm. I never had to experience the DAILY fear in school described above. Back then we thought this was going to be a one-off incident. That it was so bad, no one would ever do it again. But there were circulating worries that copy cat killers would emulate what they saw. That it would start happening more and more. I hate that those worries proved to be right….