Closer than you think…

“ATTENTION, all students and teachers, get to the closest classroom now. We are in a shelter in place.”

It is Dec. 3, 2015, and this message can barely be heard over the ruckus and commotion that consumes Ms. Gerber’s room every day at lunch.

“Gerber! Did you hear that?” a student shouts.

“What?” she asks.

“Something is happening. I think we’re in a shelter-in-place.”

She runs into the hall to clarify that the school is indeed in a shelter-in-place.

From my usual lunch spot perched on the desks in Ms. Gerber’s room, I watch as faces, both familiar and unfamiliar, file in from the hallway.

“Weird,” we think, “if this were a drill, they wouldn’t be doing it during lunch.”

Sirens can be heard in the distance.

In A-building, where the announcements aren’t on because of PARCC testing make-ups, teachers pull oblivious students into their classroom. In Commons, students are told to sit down and put their phones away. The full message of a “shelter-in-place,” as opposed to a “lockdown,” doesn’t fully reach all parts of the school and some students are told to hide under desks while the teacher locks the door and turns off the lights.

While Ms. Gerber’s room remains calm as a few seniors chat and work on their college applications, Commons is a different story as students watch armed policemen march around the building.

“Seeing the cops with guns on campus was very frightening and only served to add to the growing fear,” says Aidan Winter, a student who was in Commons at the time of the shelter-in-place.

Only a day after the San Bernardino shooting, gun violence is fresh on everybody’s mind.

“It was scary because we didn’t know what was going on,” says Elena Robles, a senior who was in a classroom where the shelter-in-place was mistaken for a lockdown. “There wasn’t an announcement. So when [the teacher] came in, it was pretty freaky because of how prevalent gun violence is becoming and it really could happen anywhere to anyone.”

Among rampant gun-related attacks, people have been expecting and preparing for the worst. Though our shelter-in-place was only caused by a threat from a pellet gun, a serious question was raised: Why has our world become a place where schools prepare for active shooters and headlines read, “The latest mass shooting.”

According to gunviolencearchive.org, there were 52,750 gun-violence incidents in 2015. In 2016, as of Jan. 27, there have already been 2,708 incidents, a figure that includes accidental shootings and police-related shootings.

With the rising popularity of weapons, both on the streets and as a topic of debate in politics, 2015 was tagged “the year of mass shootings” by pbs.org.

On Jan. 5, Obama announced his executive-order plan to target gun control in an effort to reduce gun violence. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, Obama is directing the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives “to require any business that engages in the sale of guns to obtain a federal license to do so and conduct background checks.” This initiative also applies to “gun stores, gun sellers at gun shows and sellers of guns over the internet.” Failure to follow these protocols could result in five years in prison or a fine of $250,000.

Obama’s gun control initiatives also focus greatly on communication between state and federal authorities on criminal history. The departments of Defense, Justice and Homeland security will receive funds for research on gun safety technology. Through these initiatives, Obama hopes to reduce the accessibility of weapons and guns in America in an effort to create safe environments while still preserving our Second Amendment rights.

However, the abundance of massacres suggests that this gun control legislation is hardly coming soon enough. From the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut (Dec. 12, 2012) to the shooting at Umpqua Community College in Oregon (Oct. 2, 2015) there had been 142 school shootings, according to huffingtonpost.com.

According to pbs.org, there were 372 mass shootings in 2015 in the United States. (A mass shooting is defined as a shooting that kills or wounds four or more people.) However, this doesn’t take into account the abundance of shootings and terrorist attacks overseas, as the attacks in Paris, Kenya and numerous other locations around the world attest.

Many of those shootings did not take place in schools. The two most recent non-school-related shootings are the Nov. 27, 2015 shooting at a Colorado Planned Parenthood and the Dec. 2, 2015 shooting in San Bernardino.

With so many shootings from terrorist groups, many wonder, Is the religion behind these extremist groups to blame?

Though many people claim that Islam in particular, when taken to the extreme level, says that that those who are not kufr (or non-believers) should be killed, the established practice of Islam does not endorse the killings of innocent people.

As mass shootings, shootings in general and terrorist attacks become more commonplace, people become more afraid. With fear, comes judgment. Thus, people blame a religion for acts that do not stem from the religion itself, but rather from how people individually interpret it. Judging and restricting people just because of their religion is not going to fix the radicals and extremists of that religion.

In an effort to stop gun violence, people are turning to gun control laws. However, that’s not the only way to reduce the “popularity” of mass shootings. Less media coverage on shootings and terrorist attacks will reduce the amount of “fame and notoriety” associated with mass shootings that groups seek from such attacks, according to National Forum Issues. Another theory to preventing gun violence is to have parents restrict television and computer use so that their children are not exposed to excessive violence.

The goal shouldn’t be hiding violence, but rather learning how to combat it. Extremists aren’t going to listen to advice on how to keep American communities safe, and gun control initiatives will help to curb the accessibility of guns to an average Joe in the United States. But what will stop the availability and usage of guns in the rest of the world?

In order to stop gun violence, there needs to be a huge change, and it needs to happen now. But what will that change be?

Let us know what you think in the comment area below.