ENOUGH IS ENOUGH. ENOUGH IS ENOUGH. 5YEARS SINCE THE PARKLAND SHOOTING:

This February marks five years since the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting in Parkland, Florida that killed 14 students and three teachers and injured 17 others.

When dates like these approach, it is common for people to address the dates of the shootings as an “anniversary,” but what part of a school shooting where 17 people were shot to death warrants the title of anniversary? The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that our gun violence problem is also a language problem — euphemisms, distortions, misdirections. Students were not “taken” from their families — they were murdered. They did not show up to school one morning and simply not return home that afternoon — they were shot and killed by a man who should not have had a gun. Parents did not “lose” their children that afternoon. Alyssa Alhadef was killed, Martin Duque Anguiano was killed, Nicholas Dworet was killed, Jaime Guttenberg was killed, Chris Hixon was killed, Luke Hoyer was killed, Cara Loughran was killed, Gina Montalto was killed, Joaquin Oliver was killed, Alaina Petty was killed, Meadow Pollack was killed, Helena Ramsay was killed, Alex Schachter was killed, Carmen Schentrup was killed and Peter Wang was killed.

Clearly, the world is not all sunshine and rainbows, so why is the media not more direct about reality? It is always the same: the 911 call transcript, military vehicles disgorging SWAT teams, witnesses hugging and weeping, ambulances rolling away and candles lit at “memorials.” We never see a body. We never see what a .223 round of ammunition actually does to a human. It has all been sanitized and glossed over. Every single time I hear a congressman call for a “moment of silence,” I hear him saying, “I don’t want to talk about this.” Every tweet from a congressman’s finger’s offering the same line of “thoughts and prayers,” makes me cringe from within. If anyone had a serious commitment to “thoughts and prayers,” maybe the U.S. would not be ranked as the country with the highest number of school shootings. In every instance that a politician urges the “thoughts and prayers” phrase, they never pay victims any form of meaningful thought, discourse or discussion on the time families spent planning funerals for their grade-schoolers.

While I was in sixth grade enjoying my middle school’s Valentine’s day dance in our school’s cafeteria, a gunman walked through the doors of Marjory Stoneman Douglas and murdered 17 people. Weeks before that horrific incident, Education Week began tracking shootings in schools that resulted in injury or death. Since that time, other high-profile, mass school shootings have killed and injured people in dozens of other shootings that did not garner the same media coverage and public outcry, but were no less devastating to the schools, students, educators, families and communities affected.

One singular hour. At 11:33 a.m., just last May, a shooter entered Robb Elementary School in Texas and murdered 19 innocent third graders and their two teachers. When police arrived at 11:35 a.m., what was their solution? How did they fulfill their oath to “protect and serve” our nation’s most vulnerable? Law enforcement proceeded to lock a deranged gunman with an automatic killing machine inside the elementary school classroom. Over the next hour, he murdered every single soul inside. Over 19 idle police officers stood aside, watching the second-worst school shooting in history take place.

Our country’s refusal to enact gun-control measures of any kind today and every day is killing our children. When I think about walking into school every day, I hold the same fear as many other American students: that I could be the next child texting my mother under the “safety” of my desk at any moment. I worry that my mother will be the next parent to wait outside a community center or police station to learn how many bullets I took while I was analyzing a rhetorical situation or completing a timed writing.

21 people are shot every day in the U.S., and with guns now being the leading cause of death of our children, America’s 120.5 to 100 gun-to-resident ratio is to blame. 103 people have been killed and 281 people injured in school shootings since 2018. In 2022, there were 51 school shootings — more than double the numbers for 2018 and 2019, which both saw 24 such incidents. Last year, school shootings hit a record, with 100 people shot on school campuses and 40 people killed. With state legislators more focused on bathroom bills, abortion and “voter fraud” than on gun safety, it sickens me that the thing standing between me and gun violence is a fabricated culture war that continues to grapple the attention of a nation far more than a story of a child’s cold-blooded murder.

If you see something, say something. Call Anthony Rodriguez. Call Carlos Gimenez. Call Marco Rubio. Call Rick Scott. It is up to you to understand how elections affect our daily lives and whether we live or die while in a classroom. We will be the generation that ends school shootings. It is up to us to ensure that.

Amy-Grace Shapiro Online Editor-in-Chief a.shapiro.thepanther@gmail.com

DESIGN BY ELLA PEDROSO