Just having finished your math homework, face-washed and teeth-brushed, you head to bed. You turn off the lights and make sure your alarm is on, but check your phone one last time. A text from your friend group chat pops up.
“Guys, someone’s shooting up the school tomorrow.”
You set into a panic. Should you even go to school tomorrow? You don’t know what to do, so you investigate, texting everyone in your contacts. Your basketball group chat thinks that someone threatened a different school. But your English friends think it’s someone in your grade.
Students are too quick to send around false information about serious events like school shootings, spreading even more of a panic and distracting from the real issue at hand — how normalized the thought of a school shooting is.
Just this past week, an anonymous threat went out nationwide directed towards an unspecified “East” high school. There was no high school in particular named, so when the email that had originated in Illinois circulated, there was massive confusion about what school it was actually referring to.
It eventually reached the Shawnee Mission East community and led many people to speculate that the shooting had occurred or was going to occur at Olathe East high school. Texts floated around with false reports of casualty numbers, injuries and more — with so many different stories, it was hours before anyone realized the shooting never even took place.
Over the past few years, school shootings have become a common topic as they’ve been happening more frequently across the nation. According to a chart by chds.us there have been nearly 250 shootings or incidents in 2021 while there were less than 50 in the year 2012. While the conversations surrounding possibilities of gun control and school shootings have helped to spread awareness, it’s also surged a spread in paranoia and rumors.
Another concern is that the more frequent occurrences and normalcy could potentially lead to the idea of committing a shooting into a student’s head.
Although spreading rumors can be damaging, it’s still important to share the information that you may get to friends or family to keep them safe and updated.
East Vice principal Dr. Susan Leonard has received many fake bomb threats at past schools that she’s worked at. Even though they weren’t always accurate, her schools have always taken the same precautions with each threat. It was important for them to know that their school was always being as safe as possible for their students and staff.
We live in a time where students are taught to prepare for a school shooting when our parents would have been preparing for a fire drill. Sending in a shooting threat as an “impulsive prank” has become the equivalent of pulling a fire alarm.
Some students have been referring to this time of year as “school shooting season.” There shouldn’t be a “season” dedicated to something as tragic as students losing their lives, and normalizing the topic in a joking manner is only adding to the problem.
School shootings aren’t something to lightheartedly laugh about with your friends. Now that instances of armed attacks at school are higher than ever, students should know better. On some level, normalizing these tragedies in our daily conversation affects the number of times they appear in our everyday media intake.
In order to eventually end school shootings, we as a society need to think of them as less of a topic of discussion and something to gossip about, and more of a tragedy that shouldn’t appear in our Instagram feeds ever again. The last thing anyone wants is for a shooting to feel accessible to students.