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I was in elementary school the first time I participated in an active shooter drill; my teacher struggled to explain why it was necessary, eventually giving up and framing it as a game of hide-and-seek. I often wonder how that conversation plays out in classrooms today and whether students who have only known heightened school security and constant coverage of mass violence need less explanation, since it’s become such a familiar part of childhood.
Researchers call young people raised entirely in the era of those drills, after the Columbine High School shooting and after 9/11, the “massacre generation,” some members of which have directly experienced more than one mass shooting before turning 25.
Nearly 50 million young Americans – ages 18 to 29 – are eligible to vote in the upcoming midterms, and in some cases, they’ll weigh in on gun policy directly. Political observers have assumed that as this generation gains voting power, stricter gun laws will follow. But according to criminologists Jillian Turanovic from the University of Colorado Boulder and Kristin Lloyd of Clemson University, while more than half of these young adults fear they or a loved one will become a victim of a mass shooting, they disagree on what to do about it.
