USA people - have you ever personally experienced a school shooting?

I had a bomb threat at my school but then they went thru a referendum and completely redid the school and put glass walls for every classroom so I hope my school never experiences it because it would be catastrophic on all levels.

And no they are not bulletproof glass.

No. This doesn’t mean it’s not a problem. It’s kinda like tornados, yes they happen all the time on tv and I get warnings all the time but my house has never actually been hit by one.

It is very scary when you get notification of lockdowns. Those happen all the time.

The schools take no chances and go into protocol at suspicious activities or threats.

It also helps that I’m not in an open carry state. Our gun laws are very tight, making it difficult for our youth to access guns in the home.

No thank god, but Stoneman Douglas was my sisters high school, and where I would have attended if we didn’t move. I graduated long before the shooting but still felt close to home for me.

As a teacher I have been in a school building when a gun was fired and hit a school window. It was not a “school shooting” because it was two cars driving by shooting at each other.

School shootings are a very small percentage of shootings overall though. You’d have to basically remove yourself from society as a whole to remove the risk of any type of gun crime happening around you.

For what it’s worth, I’m 42, have been teaching for 17 years and that’s the only incident that has happened - and this is in an urban school in a city where unfortunately gun violence isn’t a super rare occurrence - but the vast majority of it isn’t random and is related to drugs.

Guns and shootings in general are a huge problem here, school shootings being the most devastating but even if that particular thing doesn’t happen to your family it’s likely some sort of gun violence will get close to you eventually. My husband was shot at on the highway in December (bullet missed him thank god but hit his side mirror) and back around 2019 he was also where that mass shooting occurred in El Paso. I have countless friends who’ve been affected by gun violence in some way, for me it just seems inevitable if you live long enough in the US that youll have your own story with it or someone close to you

Also my kids school has had several lockdowns just because of gun violence nearby somewhere, not inside the school but it’s still kinda traumatizing for kids and hard to explain to them

I’ve experienced more than one bomb threat while I was in school.

One of my schools would do active shooter drills by actually firing a gun with blanks in the hallways.

Fortunately I haven’t experienced a school shooting bt unfortunately I was at a “mass shooting” here in round rock at a Juneteenth festival! They started shooting & it was one of the scariest moments of my life, I have ptsd from it & I wouldn’t wish that on anybody, let alone children. I can handle the trauma as an adult bt I can’t imagine what kids who experience that go thru.

No, but we did have a somewhat realistic active shooter drill where we had to pretend to run for our lives while someone shot blanks. That will stick with me.

A few bomb threats, some of which came from an older teen classmate.