Lillian Curtin

Magnus Manske/Liam Enea/Formulanone/Don Holloway/Chris Rycroft/PHOTO

Trigger warning: gun violence 

At the time that I’m writing this, it’s December 12, 2025. It’s a day before the thirteenth anniversary of the Sandy Hook school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, that took the lives of 20 elementary school students. 

Around 4 p.m., news broke that Brown University enacted its shelter-in-place protocol.

Two people are dead so far, and at least eight are in critical condition, according to a statement from Brown’s president, Christina Paxton.

I wish I were surprised that I’m yet again refreshing my phone for updates on a school shooting. I’m not.

The first thing I did was text my friends who were there. Thankfully, everyone who has responded hasn’t been hurt and is still in hiding. 

As an American student, there is an anxiety that isn’t talked about enough, whether it’s subconscious or conscious. Oftentimes, it’s subconscious, and we barely think about it until we have to. It’s always in the back of our minds. Frankly, it’s an anxiety that weighs too much on students, but not enough on lawmakers.

I want to preface by saying, I cannot fathom the pain that any victim of a school or mass shooting has experienced, nor do I intend to equate any fear that I have to the fear that Brown University students are facing at the exact moment I write this. 

As I said earlier, Dec. 14 is the anniversary of the Sandy Hook shooting. There are multiple Quinnipiac students who were there that day, and The Chronicle has had the absolute privilege of being able to share some of their stories. Stories that deserve a microphone and an audience, so I encourage you to read them. 

I am fortunate enough not to have one of those stories to that extent. I have never been involved in a school shooting, but I grew up in the American school system, where, at this point, it’s a coin toss of whether or not you’re going to get shot and killed. It’s merely luck. 

Thirteen years ago, I realized that school shootings were a possibility. I was seven, and so were the kids who were murdered in Newtown. I watched kids my age being shown on TVs before I could comprehend that it was possible that kids that young could even die. 

Seven-year-olds shouldn’t even know the concept of a school shooting, be scared of being killed at school or actually be killed. 

Those are the two options for Americans in school: experience one or more school shootings or live with the constant fear of experiencing it. There is no peace of mind. 

A majority of American teens also say they live in fear of school shootings. That’s just teens ages 13 to 17; it doesn’t even count college students.

School shooting drills started to pick up after the Columbine High School massacre, but really started to pick up for me after Sandy Hook in 2012. When my school started to replace the front doors with bulletproof glass and a wider security area, that anxiety started to pick up too. 

“Why do we need bulletproof glass?” “Why would bullets be in my school?” 

You can’t hide reality from a child when you’re actively putting proof of a threat in front of them. 

Throughout elementary school, we learned where to run and hide, like it was just another lesson. Every quarter, we’d sit crowded in the class bathroom in silence, just as one heroic teacher did in Newtown. 

Imagine teaching a group of those kids that their one hope of staying alive is hiding in a bathroom. I remember when we were even told what to do if we were in a live-shooter situation and someone had to use the bathroom. Yes, the teachers would explain to a group of seven-year-olds how to pee in front of each other, in case we had to be in there for hours because someone was trying to kill us. It sounds ridiculous and made up, but it’s the reality of it.

I knew that most of these events were just drills, but when they started, my pulse would race anyway. 

When I was in fifth grade, that anxiety became reality for a brief moment. As a kid, you look to the adults in the room for that peace of mind you’re so desperately trying to find when you feel like you’re in danger. Well, when you recognize that the adults feel like they’re in sudden danger too, it’s hard to feel at ease.

That’s what happened one day when all of a sudden it wasn’t just a drill anymore. I’ll never forget my teachers’ faces when a “code red” was called, but they weren’t informed of a drill. We sat in cubbies, our teachers visibly upset and confused. 

Later, I was told that a parent came to the school with a weapon, but it was quickly forgotten, and we all moved on. It wasn’t a full-on shooting, so I still don’t have answers, because an “almost” feels like nothing when other schools have been permanently destroyed. 

When we got older, the method changed. We weren’t little defenseless kids hiding in a bathroom anymore; we were now made to be fighters in our own classrooms. 

Stack the desks in front of the door, find the heaviest textbooks and use the Chromebooks. That’s what we would hear.

So, it shouldn’t be surprising that most of us are conditioned to locate our escape route when we’re sitting in a classroom, or to think about how we would survive if we needed to. Some thoughts that I’ve had in school more times than I can count: “Would they find me if I hid under that teacher’s desk?” “How long could I hold my breath to play dead?” “Would I survive the jump out of that window if I needed to?”

In this conditioning, you also get to a point where you profile your own classmates who are quieter or socially awkward, because we’ve been told that’s a warning sign. At some point, PSAs against bullying switched. It went from “you never know what someone is going through, so be kind,” to “You never know who may snap.” 

As the years went on, and more school shootings happened, the anxiety got worse. I used to think I just had to survive high school, literally survive, and then get to college because “it happens less at colleges.” 

I look at what happened at Brown today. 

One of the kindest souls I have ever met was there. We went to high school together, the place where I thought this anxiety might end. Now, she’s lived through a school shooting.

I’m scared, I’m tired, I’m angry. I’ve been dealing with this fear for nearly my whole life, and I’m grateful that, for the most part, it’s just a fear. Not everyone has been that lucky.

Nobody talks about this anxiety because it’s normalized; most don’t even acknowledge it. The fact that school shootings have become a part of our culture is horrific. 

President Donald Trump’s response was that all we can do is “pray for the victims.” What are thoughts and prayers doing? Nothing.

Actually, I’m convinced that lawmakers are confused about the concept of “thoughts and prayers.”

Thoughts and prayers were what I was doing, sitting in the cubbies on that day in fifth grade — thoughts that I was going to have to look down the barrel of a gun, and prayers that I lived to see 11. 

Thoughts and prayers are something you do to give yourself and others strength to persevere mentally, but they are going to do absolutely nothing for those who are already dead. So let’s stop pretending that those words equate to human shields, or better yet, legislation. 

It’s easy to ignore when “it doesn’t affect you.” Most lawmakers weren’t in school after Columbine, and they lived in a time when this worry didn’t even exist. I have only been in school after Columbine, during Sandy Hook, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Robb Elementary and now Brown, and the number is only growing. 

Need I remind everyone that, technically, Charlie Kirk’s murder was a school shooting?

If you’re against gun control, just remember: it doesn’t affect you until it does. It sounds cruel, but it’s a harsh truth that it is a possibility that your child or grandchild could be gunned down in their classroom. 

Does it scare you? Good. Join the club. If handing over a fraction of my anxiety of getting shot on campus means that it actually clicks, then I want lawmakers to have it, because I’m fed up. 

I don’t want my children to have to live in fear of being shot, and I don’t want to be afraid of losing my child to the thing that I was lucky enough to avoid. But just because it hasn’t happened to me yet, doesn’t mean it won’t. The same goes for you. That is the fear that American students constantly face. 

If it’s not me or you sending that final “I love you” text today, will it be us tomorrow?