Lockdowns Lower Grades

The only thing that upset me about the mass shooting this week was my entire lack of reaction outside of annoyance at the disruption of the school schedule. We can all get shot at any time. I wish this wasn’t the case, but I feel most angry that my kids probably have lower grades as a result.

This week, less than two miles from the High School my children attend, a man with a gun shot a bunch of people in a medical waiting room. It wasn’t the first time this school year that gun violence meant the school was on lockdown, and so for me, sitting another mile away from the event, I was just annoyed more than anything. I was actually surprised when a relative called to check if we were ok, because I didn’t know the shooting had made the national news and was confused as to why it would.

I want to be clear that my lack of reaction to the violence was not because I live in downtown Atlanta. Gun violence, and violence in general, has happened all around me for the last three decades. Around the turn of the century, a man in middle Tennessee crawled out of ceiling tiles at a fast food restaurant and killed all the young people while they were counting out the registers. This happened right before I left Tennessee for good, and cemented my feeling that if someone with a gun wanted to kill me, there was nothing I could do about it. The man who killed those restaurant workers was never caught.

If you’re around violence enough - and we are, as Americans, all the time - you just kind of get used to it. The first few times my children’s schools went on lockdown, I worried. After I really thought it through though, I quit panicking, because I feel like my children’s schools are secure from *outside* threats. This is of course naive, given what happened in Nashville a few months ago and Uvalde not quite a year ago. Still, ever since those people my own age were killed closing up a fast food restaurant for less than a thousand dollars, I haven’t been able to be scared by potential gun violence.

Sometimes when I’m in a crowd - any crowd, any time - the thought that a crazy person could start spraying bullets randomly creeps into the back of my head. But I love crowds. I love concerts and parades and DragonCon. So do I stay inside and deny myself the basic human joy that comes from participating in society, or do I shove the fact that I live in a very violent society to the back of my mind and get on with life? I think every American knows the answer to this question, even as they pull their kids out of public life and into homeschooling in record numbers.

As the search for the missing shooter Wednesday went on, less than two miles from the High School, less than three miles from our town home, around four miles from the husband’s office, we just got on with our lives. The violence did disrupt the kids' education though. My older daughter needed to talk to her Biology professor, but that period of the day was canceled. My younger daughter was supposed to attend a math study group in advance of the state milestone testing after school, but that study group was canceled. No one at the High School was directly hurt by bullets, but we can safely assume both my kids had their grades impacted by the lockdown as a direct result.

When the shooter was caught north of the city in Cobb county, I hope people realized that living downtown wasn’t any more inherently dangerous than living outside the city, where the man was caught. I doubt that idea got through to anti-urban die-hards though. I bet though, just like most Americans, that every time conservative rural or suburban residents are in a crowd they know how easy it would be for someone to start spraying bullets. Gun violence can happen anywhere, at any time. Your young adult closing a fast food restaurant, your attendance at a country music concert, your doctor’s office waiting room. Anywhere, anytime.

I hate that it lowers test scores when this happens, because I can't do anything about the violence. I've marched. I've signed petitions. I've voted. Now I just have to wait for the kids - and I hope it's the millennials, that we don't have to wait for Gen Z - to actually make the change happen. I hope my grandkids aren't going through lockdowns like this. Those lockdowns really do lower your grades.