About The Parkland Shooting

I know that I have been inactive lately, and I wanted to apologize for that before I go into what I'm about to say. I will talk about why in another blog post but, I don't want to focus on that right now.

Instead I want to focus on something that needs to be addressed: The Parkland Shooting.

As someone from Generation Z, I remember vividly the events of Sandy Hook Elementary School played on the news and the grieving parents' interviews only to watch the adults in the world slowly forget that the shooting had ever happened.

I was ten at the time, around the same age as the school students in Sandy Hook. I wasn't aware of what politics was or what it even meant.

All I knew was that those people on TV, the ones talking about giving teachers guns, were saying something scary. All I knew was that the thought of my teacher having a gun made me feel unsafe.

It only took Aurora for me to see that the pattern was evident. Thoughts and prayers followed by "now's not the time" followed by the event's eventual fading into oblivion. For a time, I almost accepted that's how it would always be.

Almost.

When I first watched the events of the shooting at MSD unfold on Twitter, one of my first thought was,

"Oh, there's another one."

It didn't even phase me at all. Like school shootings were just an everyday occurrence. Like school shooting were natural.

In a twisted way, they are.

I wasn't alive for the Columbine shootings. I don't know how the events played out. The only thing I know was that the shooters bought their bullets at K-mart.

I was born after 9/11 too, so I don't know what lax airport security looks like.

I clearly remember what is was like during the Great Recession. How my family struggled a lot financially.

And I don't have memories of a time when there wasn't war in Iraq and Afghanistan. When there wasn't war in the Middle East.

So, to answer the parents that are asking themselves "How are these kids able to be so brave?" "Why are these kids so mature?"

We've never known anything else.

We're the "Mass Shooting Generation" for a reason.

My generation has grown up in a time where it was easy to see all of the wrong in America.

We've had all our facts straight since the very beginning. We're not stupid.

It's not hard to see that there's something wrong with our representatives if they won't talk gun control with the people who are the victims of them.

I've watched videos of what occurred inside the Stoneman Douglas school building.

There was loud gunshots constantly going off. Chaos everywhere. There was a child, lying limp, bleeding with some of it smeared on the floor. The sound of glass shattering followed by even more gunshots. Constant screaming. I heard kids chanting "I'm so scared" like a lifeline.

What about that screams "We need more guns"?

In the little over a week since the shooting happened I've watched representatives spit in the faces of the victims over and over again. I saw it in Trump's "Listening Session", I saw it when Florida lawmakers voted 71-36 to table the bill banning assault weapons while Parkland survivors were in attendance, and I saw it when Marco Rubio refused to seriously answer a survivor's question about whether or not he will reject donations from the NRA.

This not only shows failure on behalf of the legislature, it shows how, yet again, my generation has been failed by the very people who were supposed to protect it. The Adults, The government.

And to the adults who are calling the survivors "crisis actors", SHAME ON YOU!

Your actions themselves reflect on the quality of your character and right now, you're with the lowest of the low. Adults saying that we should go back to eating Tide pods... SHAME ON YOU! You seriously think I've got that much time between studying and applying for college and homework and even part-time jobs? I don't have time for dumb shit!

We're not going away anytime soon. #nevergain will continue to persist if inaction continues to be the way Congress "solves" their problems.

We're going to continue to call B.S.!