Read me a Substack article recently, theorizing that one possible reason Gen Z generally looks older than they should is because they grew up with schools being shooting galleries. That Millennials and Gen Xers didn’t go to schools in target-rich environments.
May be something to that. My daughter has grown up in a world where they have regular “safety drills” in case, y’know, somebody comes to their place of education locked and loaded. They normalize it, because they have to, and it probably takes a toll on the kids’ psyches.
So, not to debate the original poster’s mission statement - they actually have plenty of interesting reasons Gen Z has grown up in a world that ages them prematurely, many having nothing to do with gun violence, and they could well be right.
Just pings with me when people attribute school shootings as a solely modern occurrence.
Schools being shot up didn’t start with Columbine in ‘99. I don’t think it even started with Charles Whitman in ‘66. I’ve read some accounts of “Little House on the Prairie”-type schoolhouses getting shot up (though, maybe not by students, that part I don’t recall).
In some sense, all of us have been living with the threat since America was born.
Even I, in my early teens, had a gun crisis at school in the 80s.
(I don’t know if growing up in Phoenix changes the statistics some; maybe our fair city was just ahead of the curve. They sure do love their guns there.)
I was in junior high (“middle school” for you Gen Zers) when a student at our school took her class hostage, sitting at the front of the classroom on a stool with a gun. I wasn’t in that classroom, so I don’t know how she did it, if she announced it dramatically, or just walked up with the gun and took charge; all I know is, she ended sitting up in the front of the room, gun in hand.
In the days that followed, I heard lots of stories as to why she did it. There was talk of problems with either a boyfriend, or a former best friend, or both, or neither. I never got a straight answer, and I didn’t know her.
To my knowledge, nobody got shot that day. Far as I know, nary a round was fired.
I did get the pleasure of watching the SWAT team hutt past our classroom, getting ready to take her out if the need arose. But, from what I heard, she basically spent some time at the front of the class, upset, perhaps some tears, and finally surrendered, having not hurt anyone. Physically.
I was in Math class at the time. We weren’t told much, just to stay where we were until the situation was resolved. Think we were there a couple of hours. I remember it being mostly quiet as we whispered among ourselves. They didn’t have us get on the floor, just stay in our seats, and we sat and waited. Think the teacher locked the door, but that was it.
Compared to the last thirty years of atrocities, it’s a quaint story by comparison.
And it’s already a radical statistical anomaly. A girl brings a gun to school. When was the last time you read about a girl being the one brandishing the AR-15 and unloading into the student body?
So, yeah, an event so out there, I probably should just count it as a rando occurrence, right?
Except, it wasn’t, really.
My mom was an elementary school teacher, in a “lower-income neighborhood” in Phoenix. Kids brought all manner of shit to school, including knives and nunchucks and brass knuckles and all kinds of melee weapons, that mom had to constantly take from them. Because of a burgeoning realization that teachers had been granted a little too much leeway to beat the shit out their charges, new rules had risen in the 80s, requiring teachers to be totally hands-off with students, including in the removal of weapons.
Meaning, if my mom wanted to take a dangerous weapon off a student, she had to ask them nicely.
You can guess where this is going.
My mom was in the classroom one morning, when her kids started buzzing, “Such-and-such has a gun!” So she had to ask Such-and-such, “Hey, would you mind opening your backpack?”
“Hey, would you mind taking that gun out of your backpack?”
“Hey, would you mind handing that gun from your backpack over to me carefully? Butt-first, please. Thank you!”
Luckily, again, for all involved, there was no shooting that day. Things went as best as they could. But they could’ve turned on a dime. The kid might’ve refused to give the gun up. Or, he maybe could’ve just decided that he was already in trouble, and what would shooting a teacher or another student matter at that point?
These are just the cases I knew of, because they affected me or my immediate family. Those weren’t the only instances of guns in schools at that time.
It was already in the air. Stephen King had written a whole book about it in the 70s, “Rage,” wherein a high school student shoots his teacher and takes his class hostage.
(That book had a heavy resonance with me when I read it in high school, believe that shit.)
Is the trauma the same as Gen Z and their shooter drills?
I dunno.
Probably not.
To be perfectly honest, you’d hear about shit like those couple of incidents, you’d shake your head, and wonder what was wrong with the world, but I don’t know that it was any more or less fucked up than all the other shit we had to deal with growing up. Seemed like kids were still safer at school than in their own homes, a lot of the time.
These incidents I’m talking about happened with almost no warning at all. They’d happen, and they’d resolve, and since nobody died, the trauma was probably different.
They certainly didn’t happen every other freakin’ day.
When my partner John Longino and I started our podcast “The Hold Up,” we originally used cover art that depicted a gun in it. It was meant to be funny.
But every month when we’d post an episode, it seemed like there was some kinda shooting, and it just looked in bad taste to have our art hovering there on social media next to articles about the latest atrocity. We tried to delay postings in that case, but it’s so prevalent a problem, we would delay it, just for another shooting to take place a day or two later.
We eventually had to change the art to solve the problem.
So, yeah, guess there’s something to the theory about Gen Z’s traumas making them look older.
And yeah, I can hear it now, “What’s your solution, wise-ass? Huh?!”
I suppose it would shock nobody that I don’t have one. None that anybody seems to want to deal with, anyway. Any chance of getting this horse back in the barn is long gone. Not because we couldn’t still legislate gun control, or other oft-suggested solutions. We could. It’s done in other far-away lands.
It’s just that, we, as a country, as a society, don’t want a solution. We’ve abdicated responsibility. We’ve decided, for whatever reason, we like living this way.
And there’s no solution for that.
Don’t try and argue me different, either. Sure, people like me aren’t happy that my kid is potentially going to school in a slaughterhouse, but I still send her off, hoping statistics are on my side. Only other alternative is homeschooling, and there’s lots of reasons that’s not a good solution for our family.
No, the real answer is, we just don’t care enough. About our kids, about their safety, about their lives. We claim different, but every day, we offer them up as sacrifices to The Almighty Gun, and hope it isn’t our kid that loses the lottery.
Think Shirley Jackson wrote some story or another about this very thing.
Now, if you’re a gun enthusiast, and you find something triggering about me pointing this out, ask yourself, why? Why are you upset? You don’t offer a viable solution. You want your guns exactly as they’re offered now. You don’t want more money spent in schools for security and safety.
And nothing will change on this.
You won.
Your will is the law of the land.
So, if you’re angry at me for pointing out that the system is operating the way you want it to, ask yourself…
Why are you mad?
(I’ve pre-programmed this article to land a few weeks from when I wrote it. At the time I wrote it, May of 2025, there hadn’t been too many school shootings of note. But in case this lands on a day where a school shooting has just taken place, as is a high statistical probability, just note, one has nothing to do with the other.
At least, directly.)
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I like the question "Why are you mad?" Because it's never made sense to me that while (a) I assume everyone would understand why we'd be trying to figure out how to stop shootings, (b) there is anger at someone suggesting ideas for that--just one of them being "Should we address the easier access to gun and ammo in this country?" We're just trying to solve a big problem; not using it as an excuse to destroy freedom.