How Have School Shootings Shaped Your Experience as a Student? - The New York Times - 0 views
-
More than 311,000 students have experienced gun violence at school since the Columbine High School shooting in 1999, according to an estimate by The Washington Post. Those who have not experienced it have still grown up as members of what a 2018 New York Times article called the “mass shooting generation.”
-
What is it like to be a student in the shadow of this violence? How have repeated mass shootings affected your generation? How have they affected you?Though the article was published in 2018 following the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., it remains resonant in the wake of several more American gun massacres. The authors wrote:
-
This is life for the children of the mass shooting generation. They were born into a world reshaped by the 1999 attack at Columbine High School in Colorado, and grew up practicing active shooter drills and huddling through lockdowns. They talked about threats and safety steps with their parents and teachers. With friends, they wondered darkly whether it could happen at their own school, and who might do it.
- ...3 more annotations...
-
“A lot of people aren’t willing to talk about it,” Mr. Laske said. “When you’re part of a school community it makes you much more inclined to want to prevent things.”Soon after Amy Campbell-Oates, 16, heard about the Parkland shooting, she knew she wanted to try, in some small way, to influence the national discussion on gun violence. She and two friends organized a protest, made posters, and on Friday, they rallied with dozens of fellow students from South Broward High School.
-
Does your school conduct active-shooter drills or lockdown drills? If so, what are they like for you? Do they make you feel safer or more worried? Do you think these kinds of drills are a good idea?“The repetition of horror numbs the mind,” Thomas Fuller wrote in a recent Times article on the growing toll of gun violence. Have you ever felt this way? Do you think that, as a country, the United States is growing numb to these attacks? Why or why not?
-
Do you think we are reaching a turning point, or do you think school shootings will continue to occur with disturbing regularity in the United States? What makes you feel that way?