In 2015, 41 school shootings occurred in the United States. In 2025, there were 233 school shootings, following 336 in 2024 and 352 in 2023. As these numbers remain high year after year, people may feel desensitized to what once made headlines as a horrifying and shocking issue. Many fear that if the numbness persists, there will be little pressure to address the crisis.
Firearms have been the leading cause of death for children aged one to 17 since 2020, according to Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Though gun laws prohibit underage people from purchasing firearms, nearly two-thirds of school shooters are adolescents. Since the Columbine High School shooting in 1999, an estimated 390,000 students in the United States have experienced gun violence at school. Over the past five years, these numbers have continued to rise.
Zach Goodman ’26 was in eighth grade at Live Oak Middle School when the school received a bomb threat. “When we got the threat, I initially thought, ‘This is obviously a joke.’ But as we were in lockdown, I was thinking about how real bomb threats and school shootings happen all the time,” he said. “Realizing this could possibly happen to me, just as it does to people all over the country, put in perspective just how scary and real school shootings are.”
High incidence of gun violence also creates safety concerns for parents, particularly with the Trump administration minimizing gun violence protection efforts. “Because Trump was elected, [my parents] were really fearful that the gun violence would spike,” Zoe Cashman ’26 said. “[They worried] that I wouldn’t be safe growing up in America, so they wanted to move us to Germany.”
Firearm death in the United States is nearly five times higher than in France, which has the next highest rate of firearm death in the world. Germany has one of the lowest rates of gun violence in the world, 1.3% as frequent as in the United States.
Unsecured household guns are a primary factor in school shootings. On April 15, 2024, former Vice President Kamala Harris stated that as many as 75% of school shootings resulted from an unsecured household gun.
The COVID-19 pandemic instilled a national sense of uncertainty, which caused an increase in firearm purchases, according to the Center of American Progress. A 2021 University of Michigan Medicine study conducted a national survey of nearly 3,000 parents of teenagers to examine this growth’s impact on teenagers. The survey asked parents about firearm purchases in their households. Ten percent of the surveyed households reported purchasing firearms between March and July of 2020, 3% of which were first-time buyers.
The survey also indicated that as firearm purchases increased, gun owners were less likely to secure the weapons. As pandemic-related isolation led to feelings of depression and fear, unsecured household firearms created a combination of increased access and higher-risk mental states.
Director of Service Learning Katina Papson-Rigby identified two potential reasons school shooters choose violence. “Fear and isolation: It’s really easy to just [dismiss] those things as part of the human experience,” she said. “But people have done significant research and have identified loneliness, especially [among] young people, as the root of school shootings. We can’t ignore it anymore.”
Safety concerns resulting from gun violence have lasting impacts on students’ future plans. “It definitely makes me think about whether I want to stay in the U.S. in my next years.… I don’t know if I would necessarily want to raise my kids here,” Cashman said. “As [gun violence] progresses and becomes even more of an issue than it already is, I think I’m definitely going to be more persuaded to leave.”
Many are concerned that Americans have become desensitized to school shootings. “We can have a muted emotional response to horrible events given the frequency of exposure to catastrophic news, because we start to become accustomed to high stress and accept the occurrence of fear-inspiring events,” said Sheehan Fisher, an assistant professor of psychology and behavioral sciences at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, in a 2022 Northwestern Now News article.
This numbness is apparent among teens. “Because [school shootings] happen all the time, I think that [my reaction is] more of a, ‘Wow, that’s sad, but I’m gonna move on with my day’ kind of thing,” Cashman said. “If you’re not in a [place that is] heavily impacted, you see the headline and it’s just another one in the data set.”
Many see this numbness as a worrying barrier to activism. “An individual who becomes overly accustomed to negative events can become complacent in contrast to their true values because emotions can be a key driver for motivation for change and action,” Fisher said. “[O]ne may feel resigned to the belief that they do not have agency to create change and, therefore, not protest or vote to address a national issue, which leads to no major change.”
Papson-Rigby noted the significance of this numbness in the Urban community, reinforced by lockdown drills and intruder response practices. “Unfortunately, … we’ve all been so trained to think about how to stay alive while we’re studying … that we have become numb to [school shootings],” she said. “To me, that’s tragic.”
A 2021 National Institutes of Health study suggested that harm reduction strategies should center around decreasing firearm access and encouraging parents to store firearms safely. This can be achieved through stronger preventative legislation, such as child access prevention (CAP) laws, which promote safer firearm storage. The study also emphasized increased education around firearm safety, especially for families that own guns.
“To me, it [feels] ridiculous how easy it is for someone to get a gun in this country,” said Cole Ambrocente ’26, leader of the Blues for Justice club. “Right now, I feel like there [are] not enough policies protecting people in the U.S. against gun violence, especially when [it] is not a problem on this scale for many other countries.”
Papson-Rigby said that schools can take steps to support prevention and harm reduction. “ If young people are … being [appropriately] supported and encouraged and challenged, I think we’d have healthier environments and less issues [with gun violence],” she said. “We can’t wait for the government [to address the issue]. … Doing hyperlocal work is what really makes a difference now.”