I Survived A School Shooting And It Affected Me For Life

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I was outside the school, hanging out with my friends before our first class. Suddenly, we heard the lady from the front office over our school’s intercom: “Lockdown immediately, lockdown immediately!”. We were kind of “OK, this is not good, something is happening.” So, I rushed into my first class, which was chemistry. The moment I ran into the class and my teacher turned the lights out, everything went silent.

We all sat down and we just waited, we waited for anything to happen. No one knew what was going on, even our teacher, and I think that was the scariest part. The entire atmosphere in the class was just confusion and terror. All the students that are usually obnoxious and loud, went quiet. I was so freaked out that I didn’t hear anything. No shootings, no voices outside, nothing. The only thing that I heard was this one girl, who was sitting directly next to me in the classroom. She was crying. It was a horrible feeling. During that time, I wanted to distract myself from what was happening, so I was trying to stay on my phone and make sure that my friends were safe and texted my parents. Just a quick “Hey. Something's happening and I want you to know that I'm OK. I will probably be OK, but if I'm not, I just want to tell you that I love you”. Sending this message was the scariest thing I've ever done.

After a while, the voice over intercom said that things are safe. The police had the situation under control, but they wouldn’t let us leave until they had everything completely cleared. All of that was encouraging, to hear somebody say that “Hey, it's OK. It's over. Everything is going to be fine now. Don't panic”. My teacher put on the news and we finally got some information on what was actually going on. And then they started letting us go. I was able to head up there to my family.

Later we found out that the shooter was another student. From what I hear, he brought the gun to intimidate others. Then he had a fight with some guy in the school hall. It escalated, so he pulled out the gun and shot him in the back. The shooter panicked, ran into a classroom and immediately told the teacher what he had just done. I don't know why he did it. I don’t think he came there with the intent of killing one of his peers. He just wanted to show off that he had the balls to bring a gun to school. The guy who was shot was the only target. Later we found out, that he died at the hospital.

This experience just proved to me that there are so many terrible things in this world. So many things that don't need to happen, so many things that we could avoid so easily if we just talk to each other. I really hope that there is a future where things like this won't happen’ and they won’t be treated like a normal thing. I'm really excited about that future.

Animated by Meinart Animation Studio
www.meinart.lt


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