No one is safe from gun violence.
You always think that it could never happen to you. It will never happen to your sister, your brother, your best friend, your mother, your father, or literally anyone in your life.
Watching someone get struck by a bullet really made me think about that.
I walk into Shilling every day without a care in the world, and I am not thinking about how I could be shot and killed like any other person.
I am not an exception.
You are not an exception.
Kirk, a man I didn’t agree with, being shot and killed, made me truly think about how my life is fragile. I am riddled with guilt and shame that the gruesome video of Charlie Kirk getting shot made me think about the terrors of gun violence.
But man, why didn’t any of the hundreds of school shootings make me feel like this?
“Why haven’t they made everyone else go crazy?” I asked myself as I spiraled, remembering all of the shootings I had seen on the news.
Well, they have made people go crazy. People go mad trying to speak out against gun violence and are met with a brick wall.
Your child brutally dying at the hands of another person will make someone go mad, and I never think about that.
I was a small child when the Sandy Hook shooting happened. That was the first time I realized that my life could end at school. I could say goodbye to my mother, get on the bus, and never return.
I was eight years old, just a little older than the children who were attending Sandy Hook. 20 children and six adults were brutally murdered by a man who entered that school building with the vicious intent to kill.
I remember sitting on the bus to school and hearing over the stereo system that we were taking a moment of silence for the victims of the shooting. My mother purposely shielded me from the harsh reality at home, but the children at school knew and told me what had happened.
Small children had been killed, and I could be next for all I know.
As I grew up, I forgot more and more about the visceral feeling the Sandy Hook shooting gave me.
Sandy Hook victims: Charlotte Bacon (6 years old), Daniel Barden (7 years old), Rachel D’Avino (29 years old), Olivia Engel (6 years old), Josephine Gay (7 years old), Dylan Hockley (6 years old), Dawn Lafferty Hochsprung (47 years old), Madeleine Hsu (6 years old), Catherine Hubbard (6 years old), Chase Kowalski (7 years old), Jesse Lewis (6 years old), Ana Marquez-Greene (6 years old), James Mattioli (6 years old), Grace McDonnell (7 years old), Anne Marie Murphy (52 years old), Emilie Parker (6 years old), Jack Pinto (6 years old), Noah Pozner (6 years old), Caroline Previdi (6 years old), Jessica Rekos (6 years old), Avielle Richman (6 years old), Lauren Rousseau (30 years old), Mary Sherlach (56 years old), Victoria Soto (27 years old), Benjamin Wheeler (6 years old), and Allison Wyatt (6 years old).
I say their names because I don’t want to forget.
I need to remember what happened to them. It’s not fair that I just get to forget, but their families will never forget.
The second shooting I can vividly recall is the Parkland shooting.
I was in 8th grade when this one happened, and this time I had access to the internet, so I knew what was happening. No more shielding from mother; this time I had to face the terrors head-on.
Awfully enough, I don’t remember exactly how I felt when it happened, but god do I remember the aftermath. For weeks after the shooting, I was haunted by the picture of Nikolas Cruz on countless news channels, paired with the chilling footage of students filing out of the school after the tragedy.
I was disgusted.
Instead of the victims of the shooting, Cruz was staring back at me on the TV.
The aftermath of this shooting is the first that made me angry. I finally understood that it is not only devastating that children are getting murdered at a place that should be safe, but it is infuriating that shootings like this are happening, and no steps are being taken to stop them.
Then March For Our Lives started, and I began seeing the survivors of the Parkland shooting speaking up about their experience.
“Six minutes and 20 seconds with an AR-15, and my friend Carmen would never complain to me about piano practice,” Parkland shooting survivor and one of many founders of March For Our Lives, X Gonzalez, said. “Aaron Feis would never call Kyra ‘miss sunshine,’ Alex Schachter would never walk into school with his brother Ryan, Scott Beigel would never joke around with Cameron at camp, Helena Ramsay would never hang around after school with Max, Gina Montalto would never wave to her friend Liam at lunch, Joaquin Oliver would never play basketball with Sam or Dylan. Alaina Petty would never, Cara Loughren would never, Chris Hixon would never, Luke Hoyer would never, Martin Duque Anguiano would never, Peter Wang would never, Alyssa Alhadeff would never, Jamie Guttenberg would never, Jamie Pollack would never.”
After this powerful statement, Gonzalez went silent.
As this silence stretched, my thirteen-year-old brain began thinking that this could be me. In one year, I would be in high school, and something like this could happen to me.
“Since the time that I came out here, it has been six minutes and 20 seconds,” Gonzalez said. “The shooter has ceased shooting and will soon abandon his rifle, blend in with the students as they escape, and walk free for an hour before arrest.”
I cried and accepted this as my reality.
Gonzalez said the victims’ names because they don’t want us to forget about the brutal deaths of their peers.
Slowly but surely, the news stopped covering this tragedy, March For Our Lives started getting overpowered by other social media accounts on my pages, and I stopped thinking about it.
Then during my senior year in 2022, the Robb Elementary School shooting shook the world.
This time, it was 19 children and two teachers.
I saw the police camera footage of this shooting. For accuracy purposes, I rewatched the footage and felt physically sick all over again.
The cops who responded to this tragedy barely did their job. They responded to the gun shots quickly but then loitered around while the gunman was still roaming the halls.
They waited nearly 70 minutes to intervene.
19 children died, two teachers died, 17 more people were injured, and yet nothing happened.
Robb Elementary victims: Makenna Lee Elrod (10 years old), Layla Salazar (11 years old), Maranda Mathis (11 years old), Nevaeh Bravo (10 years old), Jose Manuel Flores Jr. (10 years old), Xavier Lopez (10 years old), Tess Marie Mata (10 years old), Rojelio Torres (10 years old), Eliahna “Ellie” Amyah Garcia (9 years old), Eliahna A. Torres (10 years old), Annabell Guadalupe Rodriguez (10 years old), Jackie Cazares (9 years old), Uziyah Garcia (10 years old), Jayce Carmelo Luevanos (10 years old), Maite Yuleana Rodriguez (10 years old), Jailah Nicole Silguero (10 years old), Irma Garcia (48 years old), Eva Mireles (44 years old), Amerie Jo Garza (10 years old), Alexandria “Lexi” Aniyah Rubio (10 years old), and Alithia Ramirez (10 years old).
Again, I say their names because I don’t want to forget. These children and adults were brutally murdered and utterly failed by the policemen on the scene.
As I got older, learning about the Pulse shooting shocked me to my core. I remember being so disgusted. Why would anyone ever enter a gay club and want to kill for sport?
The shooter was angry enough to shoot these people for their sexuality. It’s sick.
49 people died in the Pulse shooting, and now the rainbow crosswalk memorial they had has been removed. It has been erased from existence because Ron DeSantis declared that Florida “will not allow [their] state roads to be commandeered for political purposes.”
A memorial for 49 people was erased in the snap of a finger because they saw it as political. Disgusting.
I have only outlined a small number of shootings I have been alive for. But I mention these specific shootings because I remember them so vividly. I remember thinking that this should never happen again, that children should never die. No one should ever die by gun violence.
This goes for Charlie Kirk as well.
I disagreed with him, hated him, and will continue to denounce the hate he spewed, but he didn’t deserve to die the way he did.
Mourn him, don’t mourn him, but understand that he is a victim of gun violence, and gun violence needs to stop.
Maybe Kirk’s death will wake up those who do not think we need gun control in America.
The next time you think about how awful Kirk’s death was and how America needs to change, please remember the children and other innocent shooting victims who met the same demise as him and got less attention.
