When my son was in high school in Washington State, he told me he had a personal exit plan for every one of his classrooms, including the cafeteria, in case there was a shooting at his school. He knew every nook and cranny, where the windows and doors were, and which teachers he thought would be able to protect him and his classmates.
He concluded most of them would be useless.
He also told me what an active-shooter drill feels like.
“Mom, it feels like there’s an actual shooter in the school. People are seriously freaking out when we do these drills, even the teachers. Today, this one girl started hyperventilating and had to go see the nurse.
Everyone is not okay.”
As a parent, that was hard to hear. I of course worried about his physical safety at school, but I also worried about the trauma he experienced preparing for a shooting, over and over, and what that was doing to him and his classmates.
It’s a real thing to drop your kid off at school and wonder, even if it’s just in the back of your mind: Is this the last time I’ll see them? Should I give them a phone so they can call me during a shooting to say goodbye? And what advice should I give so they’ll survive?
My sister-in-law never thought about those things when she dropped my niece and nephew off at school in England. A school shooting wasn’t something her kids had to think about either.
They didn’t have active-shooter drills. They didn’t think about where they would hide, how they would get out of a classroom, or whether their teacher could protect them from someone with a gun.
Not like in America.
Their teachers didn’t arrange their classrooms with a potential shooter in mind. They didn’t learn what to do if a student was bleeding from a bullet wound. They weren’t asked to become gun owners and spend their weekends learning to shoot. And they didn’t go to a hardware store to buy buckets for students to use as toilets in case they were trapped in a classroom for hours.
Not like in America.
Their schools didn’t fortify their front offices with bulletproof windows. They didn’t spend their budgets on security guards, panic buttons, trauma kits, or special doors that lock from the inside. And they didn’t spend hours planning for a shooter—mapping evacuation routes, creating reunification procedures, and holding Stop the Bleed trainings for teachers, staff, and students.
Not like in America.
For the past six months, I’ve lived across the street from a primary school in London. Every afternoon I watch the kids in their adorable uniforms file out the front door to meet their parents. Sometimes I wonder if those parents realize how lucky they are to never have to worry about a school shooting or what preparing for one might do to their child.
England and America have been described as two countries separated by a common language. But I’d say we are two countries separated by what we consider normal.
In America, it’s normal to hear about a school shooting. It’s so normal, that school shootings don’t always make national news. But school shootings are only one part of America’s relationship with guns. We have more guns than people, and when young people commit school shootings, they often get the gun from home or from a relative.
In America, it’s normal for a parent to ask if there is a gun in the home where their children play. Forty percent of households with children have guns, and an estimated 6.7 million children live in a home where at least one gun is both loaded and unlocked.
In America, firearms are the leading cause of death for children and teens—more than cancer or car accidents. In England and Wales, gun deaths among children are so rare they don’t even appear among the leading causes.
People with far more degrees than I have, have studied, debated, and written about why our countries differ so much on this issue. For me, it comes down to the responses to two school shootings in the 1990s—Dunblane and Columbine.
In 1996, a gunman entered Dunblane Primary School in Scotland and opened fire on a class of five- and six-year-olds. He killed 16 children and their teacher. Fourteen other children were injured.
Three years later, two students at Columbine High School in Colorado killed 12 students and a teacher and wounded 21 others before killing themselves. The teacher, Dave Sanders, was my basketball coach and teacher when I was a student at Columbine.
The response to these two tragedies could not have been more different. But to be fair, the two countries were starting from very different places. Their relationships with guns had already shaped what each country was willing and able to do.
In Great Britain, owning a gun wasn’t considered a constitutional right. So after Dunblane, the government held a public inquiry and Parliament tightened the country’s already strict gun laws. Less than two years later, private ownership of most handguns was effectively banned.
Dunblane was the last school shooting in the U.K.
Thirty years. Zero school shootings.
In the U.S., there have been more than 400 since Columbine.
In America, gun ownership is embedded in our history and culture and protected by the Second Amendment. That makes responding to school shootings more complicated.
But the divide goes deeper than the law.
Less than two weeks after Columbine, the National Rifle Association (NRA) went ahead with its annual convention in Denver. At the time, Columbine was dominating the national news. They scaled the convention back but refused to cancel it. Families were still burying 12 students and a teacher while thousands of gun owners gathered just miles away.
Talk about tone-deaf.
Maybe that’s how something becomes normal—not because we accept it, but because we learn to live around it.
My kids are now fully grown. My daughter lives in London, so I’m less worried about her being shot. My son works in a school in Oregon, so I still worry about him.
He still notices where the windows and exits are in every classroom. What he learned as a teenager—how to barricade a door, how to make his 6’6” body as small as possible, and how to escape from a room a shooter is heading to—has stayed with him.
Maybe that’s the part we miss when talking about school shootings. We spend time debating how to stop them. But an entire generation of kids in the U.S. has grown up preparing for the terrifying possibility that they might be killed at school. I wonder what all that fear has done to them.
In America, we’ve learned to live with it. In England, they haven’t had to.
