Shootings have a grip over American society. School shootings negatively affect the lives of many American students and teachers.
Credit: Wall Street Journal
Shootings In Media
There was a movie that came out in 2021 called The Fallout that stars Jenna Ortega. With her recent break on the Netflix show Wednesday, more of Ortega’s shows and movies are moving into the current spotlight. The movie is about a girl, Vada played by Ortega, that goes through a school shooting. The director, Megan Park, interviewed with TeenVouge stating how much she enjoyed the process of filming and the actors that she chose to cast. She also shares some insight on the amount of work she put into it. Park also reveals how real she wanted to make the movie without triggering anyone that has fallen victim to school shootings. Park says she did her best to take actual victims’ experiences and apply them to the film.
This movie is very essential in the kind of world we are living in right now. The movie shows the process of Vada getting through the traumatic event. With the three shootings in California over the weekend, this movie is showing the kind of world we are in today.
In the movie, the shooting happens in one of the first scenes. Vada goes to the bathroom and another girl, Mia played by Maddie Ziegler, is in there doing her makeup. They two later hear gunshots from outside the restroom and they quickly run into a stall. The two panic when the bathroom door opens but it turns out just to be a boy seeking safety from the shooter. The three wait out the shooting together.
We find that shootings have become more prevalent in recent years. Ever since 2020, shootings have gone up at an exponential rate. It is really scary because it is very real and we are talking about life or death instead of learning and growing. As mentioned earlier, there were three shootings in California in one weekend. A single weekend.
Vada has a best friend, Nick, that survives and he does his absolute best to speak out and make sure shootings like that don’t happen again. Vada feels numb and just tries to make it through the day. Vada has a little sister who is around ten years old and says something along the lines of, “Sometimes I just think; what year are we living in, you know? I can literally buy a bulletproof backpack off of Amazon.” The little sister says this right after the shooting which is kind of poor taste but she’s a child and doesn’t know the bigger picture and the effect her words might have on her older sister. She does raise a good point, though. What year are we living in? Why do shootings happen so often and why aren’t they going down?
Vada struggles through the movie on getting through the traumatic event. She starts therapy and in her final session in the movie, she is finally able to admit how she feels about the shooting. Vada tells her therapist that she feels mad. Vada states “I feel mad, because I had no idea one guy with a gun could f–k up my life so hard in six minutes. F–k up so many lives!” This is the voice of victims of shootings in America. Anger is what they should feel. No child deserves to go to school to learn and be met with gunshots, dead classmates, and dead teachers.
School Shootings
Last year, the Uvalde school shooting shocked not only the state of Texas but most of the world as well. A psychotic 18-year-old decided to shoot up an elementary school and killed twenty-one people. Similar to the quote from The Fallout he messed so many lives up that day, in a short amount of time. That is not only unethical, but it is also unfair. Unfair that that eighteen-year-old can walk away, to jail of course, but he has robbed nineteen children of life and opportunity. He struck their families and that is so unfair. He also took two teachers. Two teachers had spouses and children. Those teachers were supposed to prepare the next generation and make our future bright and strong, but instead, they were met with this tragedy.
It is unfair that someone like the shooter, who is typically dealing with some mental problem, can walk into a public learning space and take the lives of others instead of fixing their own. It is not fair to the lives taken, the hurt communities, and especially the hurt family and friends. It isn’t fair to educators to worry about their student’s safety when threatened. No teacher should ever have to protect their students from active shooters.
Unsurprisingly though, this problem is only present in America. America is the only country that is proud of the right to carry. Well, look where that has gotten us. There have been about seventy mass shootings this year alone. It is almost February, and this shooting situation is outrageous. The number of innocent lives lost to a shooting takes ten minutes, give or take.
The only other two countries that have their right to carry are Mexico and Guatemala but their shooting doesn’t even come close to that of America. No country even comes close to the amount of gun-related deaths that America has. Canada has second place in that area but Canada doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface. America’s gun problem is out of control and it doesn’t seem to be changing. There have been little to no laws put in place to prevent school shootings.
A handful of European countries rewrite their constitution every decade so they can keep up with the current times. America hasn’t been rewritten ever. In current times, it really should be.
