By Dr. Jessica Johnson
Guest Column
When the story broke about the Apalachee High School shooting in Barrow County, Georgia, this tragedy literally hit home for me, since Barrow County is only half an hour away from Clarke County, where I attended high school.
Teachers and students from my high school alma mater, Clarke Central, were recently featured on Good Morning America to discuss their administration’s new cellphone ban policy. These two Georgia high schools made the national news during the same week. Clarke Central was part of GMA’s “Schools vs. Smartphones” series, which focuses on the effects of limiting technology distractions in the classroom, and Apalachee, unfortunately, joined the list of K-12 campuses hit with senseless and devastating heartbreak to begin the academic year.
As breaking stories on Apalachee started to overflow the news feeds on my phone, I immediately saw a post on Facebook from a friend who knew the family of one of the Apalachee students who was killed. Another friend post was from a teacher who retired from the Barrow County school system 10 years ago. I posted praying hand emojis on their pages, as it is often difficult to immediately come up with words of comfort to pass on to those who are in a dreadful moment of grief.
According to Education Week, there have been 23 school shootings this year – only 15 fewer than in 2023 – where students and teachers have been killed or injured. Apalachee is 2024’s first fatal shooting, and Education Week’s tracking shows there have been 205 gun violence incidents falling under this grave category since 2018.
The trauma from gun violence and the consistent threat of it at school has greatly affected Gen Z students. It is a heavy and unfair burden for them to bear during what should be one of the happiest periods of their lives.
Thinking back to my middle and high school years in the 1980s, there was only one mass shooting in 1982, according to research from Statista. Overall, throughout the ’80s there were only 12 school shootings.
Due to the pervasive danger of gun violence on school grounds today, students, teachers and staff must go through training and drills in case they are confronted by an active shooter. This was something my generation did not have to worry about, as I distinctly remember the safety drills during my school years were mainly for tornadoes. My mother and grandmother never had to stress over the alarming likelihood of getting a telephone call that my classmates, and I had to evacuate school due to the rage of an armed student.
Gun rage and violence is now a constant, scary reality for Gen Z students, and the lingering effects of school shootings and massacres on this generation are beginning to be studied more by researchers. A collaborative report published in July of last year by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Everytown for Gun Safety and American University’s Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab found that “youth know, on average, at least one person who has been injured or killed by a gun.”
The researchers pointed out that the young people in their 4,156 sample size are experiencing increased “anxiety, depression and posttraumatic stress symptoms.” Their results indicate that many youth today feel unsafe when in public and away from their homes, which is not surprising considering that one in four of the survey respondents said that “they had been in at least one active shooter lockdown.”
The surviving Apalachee students now must deal with the distressing aftereffects of their horrifying experience and the troubling questions of why one of their peers resorted to extreme and deadly violence. As with other school shootings that have received huge national coverage, we will again resort to our typical gun control debates and bicker over policy solutions. We definitely need to discuss gun control policy, and in the case of the Apalachee shooting, calls are emerging from parents advocating for amending school rules on cellphone restrictions in class.
However, one telling comment from Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith particularly stood out to me when he called the Apalachee tragedy “pure evil.” In reflection on what Smith said, I was reminded of Mark 7:21, where Christ explains that “from within” and “out of the heart proceed evil thoughts.” Heart in this verse refers to emotions and feelings of the mind and soul.
Something obviously snapped in the mind of the 14-year-old Apalachee shooter, and we need to focus more on the soul brokenness in young people like him who succumb to such cruelty.
Dr. Jessica A. Johnson is a lecturer in the English department at The Ohio State University-Lima. Reach her at [email protected] or on Twitter @JjSmojc. Her opinion does not necessarily represent the views of The Lima News or its owner, AIM Media.
