School is a place we all know. We all spend a good majority of our lives at this place. We learn, we grow, we meet people and we mold into who we are. It is supposed to be a safe place, until it is not.

Not even halfway through the year 2023, and there have already been 14 school shootings. Twenty-four people have lost their lives at the hands of a firearm, all while simply spending another day at school.

Here in America, as sad as it is to say, hearing about school shootings isn’t an uncommon occurrence. We hear about them more frequently than we ever should.

Every year, there seems to be an absurd amount of school shootings, and it is only getting higher and higher. According to EducationWeek, in 2018 there were 24 school shootings, and last year that number skyrocketed to 54 school shootings in 2022.

All the time, we have to hear all the new stories in the media about school shootings. We open the news and hear the numbers of how many children have been murdered and what kind of weapon has been used.

On Feb. 13, 43-year-old Anthony Dwayne McRae was responsible for the loss of three lives of college students at Michigan State University. McRae took to two different locations throughout MSU, taking three lives before taking his own life. According to NBCNews, McRae had no affiliation with the school.

“This broke me,” Grossmont Student Imani Garcia said. “I think about being one of those students sitting inside a classroom waiting to find out if I am going to make it through the night alive. I could never even imagine being in that situation. We go to school to grow and to learn. How dare someone take that experience away from us.”

The Michigan State shooting really took the outside world by storm, as college students were actively posting on social media from their hiding spots, unsure if they were going to make it through the night. The MSU shooting shocked the nation, but it wasn’t long before another shooting became the next big story in the media.

On March 28, six people were murdered in a school shooting, three of them being young children. NBCNews stated that at the private Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, a former student came into the school with a plan to attack the students and staff of this school. The 28-year-old shooter made their way by taking six lives before facing a confrontation with the police, which ended in their own fatality.

“I can’t even fathom going into a school campus wondering if I was going to make it home to my parents,” said Robert White, a 72-year-old Grossmont alum.

“Back then, we never had to worry about if someone with an assault rifle was going to burst into my classroom.”

White continued: “The thought of someone coming in to disrupt kids just trying to learn, just to create violence and ruin lives, that makes no sense to me. It breaks my heart to have seen the country take such a fall. When I was a kid, there was almost no violence like this.”

This nation has seen so many of these stories, and we only continue to see more. If more lives of the upcoming generations are to be saved, then something must be done.