It is Valentine’s Day. Students are seated in their afternoon classrooms in Parkland, Florida at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. They had evacuated the building into the warm sunshine for a fire drill earlier in the day, but everyone is back indoors now, some in the 3-story air-conditioned Building 12, typing on laptops and scribbling down homework.
At 2:20 p.m., 16-year-old Aalayah Eastmond sits in her Holocaust History class in room 1214. There was higher security because of students smoking in the restrooms, but nothing felt unusual about the normal school day. Students, faculty, and staff continued on with their afternoon unaware that former student and 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz would begin murdering people with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle within 60 seconds.
At 2:21 p.m., Eastmond and her classmates heard the first shots and immediately took cover in a corner of their classroom, in perfect view from the window in the classroom door. This is not how they practiced during their lockdown drills, but they had no time to move out of view. Eastmond eyed a window on the wall to climb out of, but opted to hide instead of risking cranking the window open in view of the shooter. One minute later, Cruz sets off the fire alarm, evacuating some 3,000 students and staff from the school. 17-year-old Helena Ramsay began handing out books to her peers to shield their heads. Eastmond commended Ramsay for her smart idea, and as Ramsay handed Eastmond a book, bullets began flying and Ramsay was killed.
“Within five seconds of me sitting down in that corner is when he came to my class and started shooting,” Eastmond said. At first she thought it was a Valentine’s Day prank. Perhaps the shooter had just a paintball gun. That could explain the red splatters on the floor, Eastmond hoped. She looked down the entire time the gunman shot into her classroom, feeling the bursts of air against her face as bullets whizzed past. Her instinct told her to play dead. As her classmate 17-year-old Nicholas Dworet was shot in front of her, she followed his movements and fell to the ground with him before pulling his dead body on top of herself. No one spoke to each other, only screams filled the room.
Just down the hall, 14-year-old Eden Hebron is huddled by her teacher’s desk. Her best friend 14-year-old Alyssa Alhadeff’s dead body is beside her bleeding out. Hebron’s classroom is hit by the shooter for a second time before he moves on to the floors above. Bodies are scattered across the classroom floor. “We keep hearing gunshots,” Hebron said. “They literally, like, will not stop.” To Hebron, it was a never-ending ringing of pops and bullets. “It felt like he was going to shoot the entire school,” she said.
As the SWAT team enters the classroom, they encourage all those who are physically able to run out of the building and to the other side of the street. Hebron exits the room, the stench of ash filling her nose as if after a fire. The bodies of her now former classmates that she had just seen minutes ago are lifeless on the floor as she escapes down the hall and into the sun.
This is the story of dozens of survivors of the massacre in Parkland, Florida, now one of the top 10 deadliest mass shootings in modern U.S. history. Students huddled in classrooms and dashed down hallways as the pops of gunfire bounced from the walls. They called and texted their parents, unsure if they would ever return home. They sprinted out of classrooms and past the bodies and blood of their peers. This was the reality for so many survivors. And it continues to be the reality as nine school shootings have occurred since Parkland.
Sandy Hook, Pulse Nightclub, and Las Vegas resulted an all-too-familiar pattern: mourning followed by a demand for gun reform met by thoughts and prayers and then an ultimate acceptance as America moved on from another massacre. But not with Parkland. Stoneman Douglas students have taken the path less traveled, igniting an unrelenting conversation about gun control and gun reform.
It’s impossible to ignore the protests that flood the news, the rallies infiltrating Facebook feeds, the tear-filled speeches as these students -- children -- blaze a trail from the single match that started it all. Despite the young age of these students, Alfonso Calderon claimed the voice of himself and his peers live on CNN: “We will not be silenced.” With a group of his fellow classmates nodding behind him, he encapsulated the mission of the survivors of the Parkland massacre. “Now, I personally don’t know the steps we’re going to have to take,” Calderon said. “But once we figure that out, we’re going to take them and you better believe we’re going to take them as soon as possible.”
Following the shooting, Stoneman Douglas students Cameron Kasky, Alex Wind, and Jaclyn Corin created the hashtag “NeverAgain” on Twitter to advocate for stricter gun regulations to prevent gun violence. It is no secret that America has a gun violence epidemic with an average of 13,000 gun homicides in the United States each year and the more than 1,600 mass shootings since Sandy Hook. While America is home to just 4.4% of the world’s population, it continues to hold 42% of the world’s civilian-owned guns. That equates to 270 million civilian-owned guns in the country. And, compared to other nations, no other country has more than 46 million guns. That means the United States still has nearly 6 times as many guns as even the second highest gun-owning country. And that’s a conservative estimate. Some studies found that there are more guns in the U.S. than there are people.
While America’s rate of gun violence is not as staggering as in countries like El Salvador and Venezuela, and we fall behind in areas like affordable healthcare and academic achievement, we do excel far beyond the rest of the world in one area: mass shootings. In the United States, mass shootings are an epidemic like nowhere else. Though mass shootings account for a small amount of America’s overall gun deaths, they occur here at a staggering rate. Nearly one-third of the world’s mass shootings happen in a country with less than 5% of the global population.
A pattern among mass shooters is mental illness, and this often becomes a topic of discussion after every massacre. Politicians give thoughts and prayers, people say we need to fund mental health, and legislation remains unpassed. That’s because correlation does not equal causation, and this viewpoint is actually incredibly offensive and dangerous to those are who are mentally ill. Not only does it demonize mentally ill people, but it also steers the conversation away from the actual problem: guns.
“If mental health made the difference, then data would show that Americans have more mental health problems than do people in other countries with fewer mass shootings,” according to an article from the New York Times. “But the mental health care spending rate in the United States, the number of mental health professionals per capita and the rate of severe mental disorders are all in line with those of other wealthy countries.” Simply put, mental illness does not cause gun violence.
One of the recent reactions to Parkland students promoting nationwide walkouts and the March For Our Lives has been the “Walk Up Not Out” movement, which was coined by Ryan Petty, the father of one of the Parkland victims. In a post on Twitter, Petty said, “Walk up to the kid who sits alone at lunch and invite him to sit with your group.” Petty captioned the post with, “If you really want to stop the next school shooter #walkupnotout.”
Alongside the rallies and marches, Petty’s movement also gained speed. While the anti-bullying and inclusive sentiment is a nice thought, it’s also ineffective and and incredibly toxic. Stoneman Douglas student Isabella Robinson wrote an article for the New York Times about this very issue: “I Tried to Befriend Nikolas Cruz. He Still Killed My Friends.” In this piece, Robinson condemns the dangerous idea that students are responsible for preventing their school from being attacked by a shooter.
“This deeply dangerous sentiment, expressed under the #WalkUpNotOut hashtag, implies that acts of school violence can be prevented if students befriend disturbed and potentially dangerous classmates,” Robinson said. “The idea that we are to blame, even implicitly, for the murders of our friends and teachers is a slap in the face to all Stoneman Douglas victims and survivors.”
Robinson detailed her personal experiences with Cruz, including being assaulted in the cafeteria, as well as cursed at and sexually ogled during a tutoring session. Robinson does not reject the anti-bullying themes of “Walk Up Not Out” saying, “as a former peer counselor and current teacher’s assistant, I strongly believe in and have seen the benefits of reaching out to those who need kindness most.” The problem is the responsibility that this #WalkUpNotOut mentality places a responsibility on students that if they cure their mentally ill and dangerous peers and were just nice to people, then maybe they wouldn’t get murdered.
Ultimately, arguments about mental illness and bullying are just excuses that steer us further and further from the real solution: gun reform. America’s mass shooting epidemic may be rooted in a glorification of violence from media consumption, a sense of that classic all-American entitlement, or a variety of other nuanced issues. But the fact of the matter is that by restricting the all-too-easy access to the weapons used in mass shootings, we can effectively save innocent lives. And it has nothing to do with infringing upon the second amendment or moving to a gun-free America.
From 1966 to 2012, the U.S. was home to 90 mass shooters. The second country in line was the Philippines with just 18 mass shooters. Today, the United States makes up just a fraction of the world’s population. Yet, it has experienced more than one-third of the world’s mass shootings. And though America has its own culture and government, we can learn a lot about gun control from other nations.
Following Australia's 1996 mass shooting, the country immediately enacted a gun buyback program, and there has not been a mass shooting since. On top of that, the buyback program cut gun deaths nearly in half nationwide. Japan has long had incredibly strict laws for obtaining firearms. Prospective gun owners are required to pass an all-day class, written test, and accuracy test. On top of this, Japan requires a mental health evaluation and extensive background checks that include interviews with family members. The country only allows citizens to purchase shotguns and air rifles.
Gun control will never be about banning guns and abolishing the second amendment. But massacre after massacre, America is equally shocked each time that an alarming number of people were murdered with a firearm as if these tragedies are not a trend. America is known worldwide for our mass shooting epidemic. Countries that once looked at us with jaws on the floor and mouths agape have become numb to our recurring problem and are shaking their heads: When will they learn? Mass shootings will not be stopped with thoughts and prayers. They will not be stopped with mental health awareness and funding. They will not be stopped by telling students to befriend their disturbed and dangerous peers. They will, however, be stopped with gun reform and regulation.
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