Heal the epidemic of gun violence

My most likely nightmare turned into reality would be a school shooting. 

As I anticipate entering my student teaching semester in a few months, I get stuck by hesitation to continue with my dream. I am closer to the possibility of being barricaded in my classroom pleading with the Lord to help me survive the day with my students and return to our families.

I fear I’ll see a day that an innocent face I greet every morning will be captured onto an “in memoriam” poster at a service held too soon. 

The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting happened when I was 10 years old. I saw the news washed with footage of flashing lights, caution tape, parents grateful to hold their surviving child and the less fortunate ones crying in agony, desperate to switch places. 

At least 26 families had to celebrate the holidays with one less person joining.

The young students were robbed of their futures. Some of them would have been preparing to graduate high school in a few months if they were still here today. 

Following the tragedy, over 2,000 miles away, my elementary school updated its safety procedures.

I remember more lockdown and shelter-in-place drills being practiced, but our naïveté steered us as my classmates would not take the training seriously.

The administrators went room-to-room aggressively, shaking the doorknob and performing their lines, “Let me in! I know you’re in there! Come on!” 

I remember some classmates making jokes and snickering about in the dark room below the windows as we were all pressed shoulder to shoulder against the wall. 

But I would think, “What if one day we didn’t hear the familiar voice of our principal on the other side of the door?”

Ten years later, I expect to receive my degree in math education in December, still seeing the words “school” and “shooting” occupying the same space in headlines. 

Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in February 2018; Santa Fe High School in Santa Fe, Texas, in May 2018; and Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, in May 2022. Those are only three of 394 school shootings since Columbine in 1999. 

The most recent one happened in the first week of the new year at Perry High School in Iowa.

I am no longer the child hiding behind a desk in the dark, but I will be the first line of defense at the door. 

I am not protected anymore. It will be my life before theirs. 

But how do I avoid the scars of the sights of intruders or the irrepressible sounds of gunshots and students wailing?

I prepare myself each day for the final message to my loved ones, but how long can I keep it a draft? 

As much as I want to help make a change in honor of the lives lost and the loved ones that bear the heartache, that law cannot be changed by just me. That decision rests in the hands of the government. 

Congress has yet to reform gun-control laws and the issue remains unresolved as children are stuck in an inescapable battleground they know as “school.”

I refuse to be desensitized to these disturbing acts, to “get over it” and “move forward.”

Change is long overdue. This battle asks more from us than our prayers and condolences to protect future generations from being met with the barrel of a gun.