REACTIONS – Shootings on School Campuses

Last week just minutes before our Grace Gazette staff meeting, news broke that there was an active shooter in Science Building IV on UCLA’s campus in southern California. It has since been reported that the shooter was a graduate student who murdered his former doctoral advisor and then took his own life. As we know, this is not an isolated incident, but getting a clear number of how prevalent shootings on campus happen can be tough. Depending on how the numbers are counted, you might hear that there have been 31 shootings since Columbine in 1999, or 52 shootings in 2015 alone, or even that there have been 186 shootings on school campuses since just 2013. Gun violence is a complicated issue to understand and to fix.

Most Grace students, including the GG staff, will find themselves on a college campus in the next few years, which makes this a topic well worth exploring. Today each staff member was tasked with writing a concise impression on the scourge of shootings on school campuses. They were only given 20 minutes and a max word count of 150 words (we weren’t terribly strict on length). You will find agreement, disagreement and a range of perspectives and ideas. You are invited to share your own reactions and experiences in the comments section.

The Right to Bear Arms
Katie Hoffman ’17

The right to bear arms. Our founding fathers created this country with the intent of making it last. Not only have we, as a country, evolved, but advanced technology has changed the way we live our lives. When the Second Amendment was written declaring that each man should have the right to bear arms in 1791, life was very different. People had to fend for themselves. Now, guns are still seen as a form of protection; however, when placed in the wrong hands can be very detrimental. While it may be hard for me to relate to people who find guns necessary in their daily lives, I do accept it as a reality. With this reality, however, we as a nation must acknowledge the fact that these “necessary” guns have caused way too many incidents across this country alone. Time Magazine reports 23 shootings on college campuses during 2015. As individual citizens, and as a country, we need to keep our country safe by making sure guns are never put in the wrong hands . 

More Complicated than it Seems
Marc Loeb ’17

Mass shootings, and school shootings in particular, are tragic. No one should have their life taken away at such a young age. However, let’s take a moment to gain some perspective, and see that this issue is much more complicated than it seems.

There are currently 50.1 million students in public U.S. high, middle, elementary and pre schools. There are several million more in private schools. There are 20.2 million students in U.S. Colleges and Universities. Last year there was about 30 school shootings and around 120 deaths. These were split almost evenly between higher and lower institutions. For primary/secondary school students this is a rate of 1 in 835,000. For Colleges and Universities this is 1 in 36,000. These odds are miniscule, especially compared to things like alcohol related deaths (4,700 per year in young people), or even the number of car related deaths (2,823 per year).

People are right when they say there are too many school shootings in this country.  30 school shootings is too many. 1 is too many. However there are other sources of unnatural death that are far more likely to affect teens and college goers. School shootings receive more attention because they are shocking, more marketable than things like drunk driving or suicides. If we switched our attention to the larger issues (not saying that shootings aren’t a big issue) more lives will be saved. Isn’t that the objective of all this?

Time to Get Involved
Grace Littell ’17

The recent statistics of college campus shootings are startling. Students should not have to feel that their lives are at risk in a school environment. College campus shootings are part of a much larger problem of gun safety. So in order to prevent future tragedies, I believe we need to get more involved with and support organisations such as ‘EVERYTOWN’, so that we can make progress with this issue on a national scale. And on a smaller scale, I believe that schools need to ensure they are cultivating a strong support system for their students. Students who are struggling should not feel alone and should not slip under the radar. It is more likely someone who is mentally unstable, neglected or feeling injustice that would be driven to inflict destruction on their surroundings.

Nowhere Near Impossible
Olive Brecht ’17

The recent increase in gun violence has become a huge issue in America both on college campuses and in general. Since January of 2016 there have been 26 school shootings from Pre-K to college and of these 26 school shootings 9 have been shootings on college campuses (www.everytown.org). There has to be more effort to limit gun access and gun use in general to try and decrease gun violence in America, “Americans are 25 more times likely to be murder with a gun than people in other developed countries” (www.everytown.org), showing that decreasing gun violence is nowhere near impossible. I believe that much more focus and effort needs to be put into controlling guns on college campuses; it is hard for college campuses around America to be a safe place for students when a shooting on a college campus happens close to twice a month.

We’ve Become Desensitized
Gigi Diserio ’18

I think society’s reaction towards college campus shootings has been to become desensitized over time as shootings begin to, sadly, become more frequent. When I get a CNN update or see a newspaper headline of a college shooting, I generally will see it and then forget about it. I think that these horrific events are beginning to be largely ignored because they do not directly affect everyone.

A question that comes to mind when I think of college shootings is, ‘why are laws on gun control still so lax after all of this violence?’ The Washington Post stated that, “states with tighter gun control laws appear to have fewer gun-related deaths.” In response to the recurring statement “guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” I question why America would not want to make some impact with limiting the availability of guns even if the impact may be small. You cannot change the people of the United States and whether they chose to kill people or not, but you very easily can change the accessibility to the weapons that they are using to destroy lives.

The Masked Bandit of School Shootings
Jack Posner ’18

College campuses are supposed to be a place of grace and security. A safe-space where no hindrance to a student’s education should occur. Colleges spend millions to have beautiful quads and comfortable dorms, to build a communal home that encourages positivity. When the news flashes of killing and spilled blood on these sacred lands how can anyone feel safe leaving home for a new world? Texas Southern integrates advanced technology into their campus, but two back-to-back shootings take away all the value of the work they have put in to establishing their university.

We all look around for a culprit to blame. We cite video game violence and exposure to weapons at home. We start a war over gun control and the continual neglect of mental illness. Kids are growing up in a world contradictory of moral tradition, a twisted world armed with the endless flow of the Internet. They see the horror of the world. They experience the response to that horror in their peers and are left with nothing but a reflection of their reality: anger. In a world of so much injustice and hate, the masked bandit of school shootings is revealed in our century’s negligence of how vulnerable our world has become. We all are the victim of this vulnerability, we feel the danger all around us. We hear of starving and watch beheadings online, and yet we overlook the effect of this exposure.

Do something kind today and show someone the world is still full of love. The only way to properly integrate the horrors of our world into new generations is to also engrave kindness into our expanding culture.

Not Even Front Page News Anymore
Erica Grosso ’18

Before 2010, college campus shootings were completely out of the ordinary in our society. Since 2011, Harvard Research shows that the amount of college shootings has tripled. Since 2013, there have been 186 school shootings in our country, an average of nearly one shooting per week, according to Everytown research. Shootings and gun violence have become a norm in our society. We hear and read about shootings in schools, colleges, and public places so often, that it isn’t even front page news anymore. There is a difference in society in how we acted when this was a rare occurrence, to now, where we hear about multiple shootings every week, and have much less of a reaction. We hardly react anymore because the gun violence has gotten so out of control that a shooting, where innocent people are killed, is not something worth being shocked over. It is not okay that this has become so common to the point where we hear about a shooting and have minimal reaction to it. It is not okay, but it is what it is, because we can’t be surprised over something we have become accustomed to over the past five years.

We’ve Become Used to It
Abisola Fashakin ’19

“We’ve become used to it” is something I never thought would be applied to college campus shootings, but it is. When people say “Oh, another kid in California got shot at so-and-so colleger” my heart doesn’t really jump anymore. The sadness and emotion that I would feel when I heard about these things a few years back is gone. I would think about lives that were lost while getting an education, innocent people going about their lives. Now when I hear about another shooting all I think is, “Well, I feel bad for their family. This is tragic,” but there is no meaning behind my words. The real truth behind my words is that, since it doesn’t affect me directly, I don’t care. I don’t care, and that is the real tragedy.

The Media Has Lost Interest
Teodora Kanlic ’19

While college campus shootings are a terrible thing, and lives are lost, it just doesn’t have a strong impact anymore. The media no longer thinks it’s such a big deal, not when people are no longer interested in that type of news. Just this past year, 17 college campus shootings have occurred, and after several, people no longer really care. Yes, it’s sad and tragic that people died, but shootings are on the news so much these days that it hardly makes a difference to people. Only when actual terrorists kill tens of hundreds of people will the media strike an interest.