At around 11:59 AM, students crowded around classroom doors, anxiously waiting for the passing period bell to ring. Before that could happen, however, an announcement came over the intercom:

Attention: East Campus is on lockdown.

It’s a seemingly terrifying prospect to outsiders. One unfamiliar with this procedure may have a million questions racing through their mind; What if someone has a weapon? What if there are bombs planted somewhere? Will I go home today?

However, in my classroom, Mrs. Coyle’s Junior American Literature, students acted with seeming apathy. “Bro, again?” someone asked, referring to the two false alarms Lockport experienced in 2024. As we huddled in the corner of the classroom, many giggled and joked about hypothetically being killed. Some, out of boredom, opened Block Blast. Personally, I settled in for the long haul and plugged in my Chromebook to knock out some homework. When the lockdown order was lifted, no one breathed a sigh of relief. We gathered our belongings and headed to fifth period like nothing happened.

…

School shootings are a recent tragedy in America. According to a 2024 CNN article, last year had 83 school shootings as of December 16th, counting shootings that “occurred on school property, from kindergartens through colleges/universities, and at least one person was shot, not including the shooter.” The same article’s statistics posit that school shootings sharply increased after the pandemic and have plateaued since.

Politicians are as inactionable as ever on this issue. During the 2024 election, the issue took a backseat to economic and immigration concerns. The last major gun reform policy, the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, was signed in 2022, despite school shootings remaining a pressing issue.

It’s no wonder that students react this way during lockdowns. It’s a terrifying thought that one day you could walk into school and never come out – so many cope by simply blocking it out. This isn’t just a Lockport phenomenon, either. In a 2025 WIRED story about an anonymous internet figure notorious for making false school shooting threats, journalists noted that during one of these fake threats, “some students, jaded from false alarms and drills, joked and texted with friends.” To desensitized students, false alarms are as routine as school assemblies or lunches with DJ’s, almost teetering on the edge of becoming a rite of passage.

However, these journalists also point out that not every student felt this way: “Others hid in silence. Some, says [the school principal], had panic attacks.”

While some are able to cope well with the omnipresent threat of violence, many aren’t. It’s these individuals who are most susceptible to experiencing trauma during threats, and even during regular school. This undoubtedly harms student mental health and makes it even more difficult for already vulnerable students to go to school in the first place.

The most frustrating part about this issue is that no one is willing to take action to solve this issue. When a school shooting happens, there is no immediate action in Congress or urgency in the White House. Politicians simply offer empty prayers, point fingers at the other side, and designate gun violence as an “important conversation to have,” which Atlantic writer Mark Leibovich calls out as “a delay tactic” in politics. Thoughts and prayers.

The political inaction on this issue is quite predictable. With rising political polarization, both sides increasingly feel they are the inherently correct good guys, and the other side is the obviously wrong bad guys. While this doesn’t apply to all political issues and “both sides-ism” is certainly a slippery slope, it’s clear that the self righteousness of a polarized America has formed a gap in which we don’t come together to search for solutions, but instead search for problems to blame the other side for.

The situation is looking bleak. There is no indication that Americans will soon become less polarized – if anything, the opposite is true. Progress on issues such as climate change will and have already come to a standstill because of baseless conspiracy theories and petty bickering. Even “bipartisan” bills or actions, such as Joe Biden’s Infrastructure Bill or the Safer Communities Act mentioned earlier received heavy pushback.

All I plead for is for the government to do something. Gun control, better funded mental health programs, increased security, ANYTHING. While we argue about the pros and cons of different solutions, our peers are dying. It’s time for this nation’s politicians to bridge the gap and bring an end to a crisis that should have never occurred in the first place.