PARKLAND, Fla. — Delaney Tarr, a high school senior, cannot remember a time when she did not know about school shootings.
So
when a fire alarm went off inside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School
and teachers began screaming “Code red!” as confused students ran in and
out of classrooms, Ms. Tarr, 17, knew what to do. Run to the safest
place in the classroom — in this case, a closet packed with 19 students
and their teacher.
“I’ve been told these protocols for years,” she said. “My sister is in middle school — she’s 12 — and in elementary school, she had to do code red drills.”
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.
Now,
this generation is almost grown up. And when a gunman killed 17 people
this week at Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland, Fla., the first response
of many of their classmates was not to grieve in silence, but to speak
out. Their urgent voices — in television interviews, on social media,
even from inside a locked school office as they hid from the gunman —
are now rising in the national debate over gun violence in the aftermath
of yet another school shooting.
While
many politicians after the shooting were focused on mental health and
safety, some vocal students at Stoneman Douglas High showed no
reluctance in drawing attention to gun control.
They
called out politicians over Twitter, with one student telling Senator
Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, “YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND.” Shortly after
the shooting, Cameron Kasky, a junior at the school, and a few friends
started a “Never Again” campaign on Facebook that shared stories and perspectives from other students who survived the rampage.
On
a day when the funerals of the shooting victims began here, more than a
dozen schools from Massachusetts to Iowa to Michigan were shut down in
response to copycat threats and social media interpreted in the worst
light. A college near Seattle was on lockdown for several hours on
Friday after an unfounded report of gunfire and in at least one case an
entire district closed down. Several students have been arrested,
accused of phoning in threats to their schools.
No comments:
Post a Comment