When I first heard about the most recent high school shooting, I was sitting in my 11 a.m. class as I looked down at my phone and saw a notification from The Washington Post on a story about a school shooting in Maryland. My first thought after reading the headline was, this has got to stop.
208. That's the number of shootings that have happened since Columbine all the way up to the Parkland shooting on Valentine's Day of this year.
While not all of those shootings resulted in multiple casualties (some didn't even have any), many of the 208 only were treated like typical local news due to the little or no body count.
On Tuesday, March 20th, 2018 another shooting was added to this list.
A student open fired that morning around 9 a.m. and before being confronted by a school resource officer, shot two students.
They exchanged gunfire in the hallway and the gunman was fatally shot. Whether it was the officer or a bullet from his gun is unknown. If the SRO had not stepped in the situation could have been a lot like the one in Parkland or worse.
School shootings have become a major problem in recent years. School is supposed to be considered a safe place, a place for some children to escape the harsh realities they have at home.
I have even seen instances on the news or that have popped up on my phone with headlines that say someone has threatened a school, whether it is a threat started on Snapchat or some other form of social media.
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So the question then becomes — is this going to become the new normal? And if so, why has society allowed it to become so? And what do we need to do as a society to try and keep it from happening?
In February 2018, CNN published an article about some ways to help prevent school shootings, it's a start but the conversation is far from over. If now is not the right time, then when is?
And it's not just schools that are targets of violence but concerts, nightclubs, and airports have been targets too.
No one wants to take guns away, they just simply want stronger gun laws that make it harder for certain people to get ones like those used in school and other types of mass shootings.
