A Numbness We Can’t Afford
ANYA GOROVITS || OPINIONS EDITOR
In the 365 days of 2025, the U.S. saw 407 mass shootings.These shootings were part of a broader gun violence crisis that caused tens of thousands of deaths across the country, including 226 children and 1,038 teens killed in mass shootings alone, according to the Gun Violence Archive’s official 2025 report.
Most Americans are aware of this stark reality: they’ve watched these numbers rise each year for decades. They watch countless shootings shown hurriedly on the news before returning to their daily lives. In school, students briefly discuss the latest tragedy in their history class before returning to the standard curriculum. Legislators put out quick statements before quickly moving on.
“[Mass shootings] have become a symbol of American culture and American freedom,” said sophomore Ari Friedman. Indeed, they’ve become almost synonymous with America’s identity, present in our history since the 1966 University of Texas Tower Shooting. On the World Population Review’s mass shooting map, most countries report 0–10 mass shootings from 2000–2022. The U.S. reports 109.
A pivotal moment for modern school shooting conversation was the Columbine shooting of 1999, during which two students killed 12 classmates and a teacher. The event fundamentally reshaped how schools, law enforcement, and the public regarded gun violence.
“When Columbine occurred, that was a time that really changed the national consciousness,” said AHS Principal Jimmy D’Andrea. Then came Sandy Hook in 2012, a shooting at a Connecticut elementary school that killed 20 first graders and 6 staff members. Rather than a turning point toward action, this shooting marked a new stage: acceptance. News of recent shootings no longer came as a surprise, and such stories quickly stopped making headlines.
Today, school-age students all around America have become used to yearly ALICE drills.
“The fact we even have to do these drills is dystopian, but I’ve usually just gone with it. It’s a fact of life,” said sophomore Ari Friedman.
School shootings should never be a fact of life.
“You can’t allow it to numb you, because that’s how things that aren’t normal become normal,” said junior Grace Arnold. Yet that is exactly what has happened. This country has watched children be killed in their classrooms, again and again, and decided that the right to own a gun matters more than the right of a child to survive the school day.
Though communities advocate for “policy not prayers” after each major shooting, nothing ever seems to reach Congress. Around 90 percent of Americans support universal background checks, yet they haven’t been passed, killed by political opposition funded by gun industry lobbying.
“Profits matter more than people in America,” said AHS history teacher Fred Hopkins. He described how the Second Amendment’s true purpose has become severely distorted. Originally written to enable collective militia defense in a newfound country with limited defense capabilities, the amendment is now interpreted as the right of every American to own murderous weapons.
Beyond gun legislation, school shootings are driven by a crisis in mental health and an American culture that seems to value silence over support.
Today, America’s emphasis on individualism has created an outlet for violence. AHS junior Tyler Bates expressed that this individualism discourages struggling students from asking for help, leading to their desire for violent expression.
“If people are still angry, this anger and aggressiveness will come out one way or another,” said AHS French teacher Olga Kostousova, who believes that gun restriction laws are very necessary, but they work only if we also address the deeper cause of violence.
Ending this crisis requires both stronger gun legislation and a cultural reckoning around mental health. It requires universal background checks, and real investment in mental health resources at the community level. It requires a culture that stops making shooters famous and starts recognizing people in crisis before it’s too late.
Most of all, it requires refusing to be numb. Many people today feel that there is not much that can be done on a legislative level to achieve peace for American children. They feel that just taking this horror as “a fact of life” is better and simpler than fighting for change. They believe that ordinary people have no voice and no ability to change this cynical symbol of America. Yet it is this belief that limits our ability to stand up for the lives of American children.
“I absolutely have hope that change is possible. But people kind of have to wake up and choose to be affected by it,” said Arnold.
In 2018, survivors of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, organized a national walkout that drew hundreds of thousands of participants. The pressure was enough to push Florida to pass its first significant gun restriction legislation in decades. So ordinary people, students especially, do have power. When enough people speak up, change does occur. But when we remain numb, we refuse change, and we let our schools remain war zones.
Four hundred seven mass shootings in one year. Two hundred twenty seven dead children.
These are not statistics to scroll past. They are a demand, one that has gone unanswered because too many people have decided to stop asking for change. America, and Americans, have the power to choose differently. The true question is whether we will, before another classroom becomes a tragedy we forget by next week.
