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There have been at least of five violent threats while I have been a student here. Bullets have been found in classrooms and in the library, and threats have been called in or written on walls. Whether it’s a bullet found in the library or a threat to the school, they all scare me the same.
Although shootings and violence in school has always worried me, my fears have heightened recently. Following the 2022 Fourth of July Highland Park mass shooting, my anxiety regarding these situations has grown. While this is the unfortunate reality of our current society, I feel that no student should have to worry about their safety while at school.
An incident on Oct. 25 at LFHS startled me. I remember heading back to school from having lunch off-campus when I saw police cars speeding down Sheridan road. I didn’t think much about it until they turned into the high school. As I pulled into the senior parking lot, my phone was flooded with texts from friends about the current situation.
“There’s a threat to our school, there’s so many cops.”
I immediately asked my friend to drive me home. I know that many took this lightly, but I was terrified. I knew that I was missing labs and tests, but I simply did not feel comfortable going to school. Someone had threatened our school.
Additionally, an email was sent out to all LFHS students and parents on Nov. 30 regarding a threat. As I opened this email with a friend I wasn’t as scared as last time. This was becoming our reality.
A mass shooting is defined as an event where four or more people are shot or killed. According to ABC News, there have been 632 mass shootings in 2023. This is America’s reality. Although this hasn’t happened in Lake Forest, it has happened in Highland Park and in countless communities like ours. According to Axios Chicago, halfway through the year, the United states was averaging two mass shootings daily. Mass shootings are heartbreaking reality that America is currently faced with.
According to Everytown, shootings involving high-capacity magazines between 2015 and 2022 led to twice as many people killed and ten times more people wounded. Considering this statistic, banning high-capacity magazines could end America’s stark reality.
Jason • Dec 15, 2023 at 10:40 am
I would not trust that claim from Everytown, since they are a paid interest group to push civilian disarmament.
Putting that aside, standard-capacity magazines (those exceeding 10 or 15 rounds, depending on who you ask) were very common from 2015 to 2022, and Everytown’s claim actually indicates that the subset of mass shootings with “high-capacity magazines” increased in deadliness from 2015 to 2022. It says nothing about how the presence of said magazines correlates to the death toll, and it says even less about causation.
Furthermore, it doesn’t make sense to assume that higher-capacity magazines cause increased death toll. The M1 Garand (a rifle with an 8-round fixed magazine loaded by en-bloc clips) can be reloaded in enough seconds to count on one hand, and a m1911’s detachable magazine can be swapped out even more quickly with less than an hour’s practice. A mass shooter can spare those seconds since students don’t shoot back. Magazine capacity is most important in situations where fire will be returned, such as home defense, gang shootouts, insurrection, and trench warfare.