In early June of 2017, I published an article titled I Faced One of My Biggest Fears, in which I talked about going n a carnival ride and facing my fear of heights. However, as of March 2018, heights is not my biggest fear, my new biggest fear is being shot to death in my own school. In the past, I was desensitized to school shootings. They happened once every 3 years, we'd talk about lockdown procedures in our classes and have a couple of drills, and then go on with life as normal. But for some reason, right after the Parkland shooting, my fear skyrocketed. There were so many shootings in schools that might have been mine. Kids that were killed in a place where they are supposed to feel safe, and people acting like it was no big deal. Whenever I told people or even teachers in middle school that I was even a bit scared of school shootings, they would brush it off as an irrational fear, and say that it would never happen to us. I wish I could say my fear is irrational, but school shootings are no longer a rarity, they are a reality.
A CNN article titled "2018 School Shootings" written by Saeed Ahmed and Christina Walker states "We're only 12 weeks into 2018, and there have already been 17 school shootings where someone was hurt or killed. That averages out to 1.4 shootings a week".
1.4 shootings may occur in a week, but the threats of shootings have skyrocketed since the Parkland shooting. There have been bombing and shooting threats made to multiple high schools in my area, and they don't seem to be stopping. My fear is no longer a silly nightmare that I can push away, now my friends and I have plans on what to do in school shootings: Run out and meet at my car, I'll drive out of school and back to my house where we can call or text our parents. We created this plan in the few minutes before we were supposed to take a standardized test, the day the Maryland school shooting happened. I am always the one in the group with the news, the one who is constantly up to date on what is happening in the world. In those minutes where we were supposed to be studying, we created the plan on how to escape our own school gym in case anything went down, as there were so many students in the gym it would be an easy target. I am a teenager, just like my friends, I should go to school to socialize, to prepare for my future, not to live in fear of being gunned down by a maniac.
My biggest fear is school shootings, and until the government listens to teenagers like me, I can't do anything about it
Sheetal Tadiparty
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