#tw: school shooting

[livwritesstuff]

this is an edited repost of something I wrote last year for the 10-year anniversary of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School (now 11 years today). to say the least, it’s a difficult day for a lot of people, including me. i wrote this all in one go just as a positive outlet for the things this day evokes and i went back and forth on if i would post it, but i know i’m not the only one who has been affected by these events. if you’re someone who finds this day to be a hard one, this one is for you.

tw: references to gun violence and school shootings

It’s late morning in December 2012 and Steve is watching the news. He isn’t really paying attention to the current segment about opiate use, too busy being completely annihilated in Words with Friends by his eleven-year-old, who just played the word ‘jinxes’ for 23 points, the bastard.

He’s mid-way through sending Moe a text (“get off your ipod you’re in class”) when the channel’s Breaking News intro interrupts the interview that he’d been ignoring. He looks up to see that the headline has changed.

Steve sees shooting, and then elementary school and feels his heart jump into his throat the way it does any time he hears sirens when his daughters or his husband aren’t home – not because he really believes it’s for them, but because it could be. There’s always a chance it could be.

And he’s got two kids in elementary school right now.

He makes himself read the headline in full – it clarifies that the school is in Connecticut, nowhere near him and his house and his children’s schools in the Massachusetts suburbs, but it does little to remedy the panic that has his heart going a mile a minute.

Steve sits for a while, eyes glued to the TV as the anchor slowly ad-libs, clearly waiting for any new scrap of information.

On the first commercial break, Steve checks his phone. He’s got one text – from Moe telling him to play another word in their game. He responds back with the message he’d written before he’d become fixated on the news.

On the second one, he texts Eddie, tells him he loves him and asks if he’s heard what’s going on (he knows he probably won’t get a response for a while – Eddie is notoriously bad at checking his phone and that’s when he’s not in a meeting he’s been looking forward to for weeks, as is the case today).

By the third, they’ve learned the school is on lock-down, but not much more.

Everything he hears after that is nothing short of harrowing, and leaves Steve feeling sick to his stomach.

Eddie finally texts him a couple hours later, after the news anchor has been switched out for another, to say his meeting ran late (an actual director had reached out to him saying she was interested in adapting one of Ed’s books into a movie – today was the day they got to talk in person) and he hadn’t known any of this was going on, but he’s on his way to pick up Hazel from her AM kindergarten session.

Steve’s day continues. He makes lunch, he finishes some laundry, he responds to emails, always with one eye on the news. His shock at what was occurring mere hours south of his home, subsides, slowly replaced with a dull horror because he’s seen a lot of things in his forty-six years of life, but nothing like this. One by one, his three girls return home from school and he hugs each of them like he always does, but today it’s a little tighter.

It’s a Friday, and Friday night is movie night in the Harrington house. It’s Robbie’s night to choose (she picks Spy Kids, like she does every time she gets to pick the movie since it came out last year). Before they start, Steve and Eddie tell their kids what happened. They do their best to find an explanation that is sufficient for ever-precocious Moe, but not too much for Hazel, their sweet kindergartner who only just turned six. Once the movie starts, they all pile under the same blanket, and where there’s usually fidgeting and arguing and occasionally having to pause the movie altogether to wipe tears and wait on a time-out because someone weaponized a foot or an elbow after they weren’t given the big bowl of popcorn fast enough, tonight there is quiet and stillness.

The next day, the girls are back to their normal, bickering selves, but Steve still can’t shake the aching feeling in his chest every time he thinks about what happened the day before. He starts to get that itch in his brain, the same itch he'd felt after he ran out of the Byers’s house in 1983, after he turned back and saw those Christmas lights flickering, the itch where he’s gearing up for a fight.

As the months go on, Steve finds himself reading into gun control laws, finds himself with multiple non-profits fighting for them bookmarked on his computer, finds himself following politics for the first time in his life as he watches bill after bill get shut down by both sides of the debate.

Honestly, Steve isn’t sure why he cares so deeply about this – and not just what happened in Connecticut, but the issue of guns and gun safety in general. It’s not like he hasn’t fired a gun before. It’s not like he’s never seen their value (he still remembers that drive to the War Zone so many years ago). It’s not like he hasn’t ever felt safer with someone nearby wielding one, even if that someone was Nancy Wheeler.

Maybe he’s a little too familiar with children being the casualties in a war they didn’t choose to start, didn’t choose to fight in, and if that had made him angry at nineteen, he’s irate now, now that he has a six-year-old like the students in that classroom in Connecticut, now that he has an eleven-year-old like El when she escaped that lab in Hawkins.

It wouldn’t be the first time Steve threw himself into a battle that had nothing to do with him, that he knew very little about, because he knows what happens when children get caught in the crossfire of a battle that has nothing to do with them, and he wouldn’t be able to live with himself if he sat idly by and watched it happen again.

#i’m NERVOUS posting this one idk #they can’t all be fun times folks #idk if el was eleven years old in season 1 i'm pulling the artistic license for that one #i am definitely projecting here but whatever that’s what fandom is for i’m pretty sure #steddie #liv’s steddie dads verse #steddie dads #steve harrington #eddie munson #tw: school shooting #tw: gun violence

[sorenthestoryteller]

Another school shooting and another "fuck you" to the people who are against every reasonable attempt at gun control.

If you can't pray while actively working to help fix the problem you aren't praying, you are just being a stumbling block to everyone else.

#tw: violence #tw: school shooting #tw: shooting #faith #Christians #gun control #I'm so damn tired

[thingstrumperssay]

Queerphobes wants to protect our children by murdering them.

#queerphobes #tw: school shooting #queerphobia #conservatives #canada #toronto

[tweetingukpolitics]

#peter frampton #political twitter #tw: school shooting #dunblane #uk news #uk politics

[capesandshapes]

"Banning guns won't get rid of the ones already out there or prevent shootings entirely"

Yeah but they sure as well will make getting a hold of firearms a lot harder, and even if that only stops just one person, it sure as hell would save a lot more lives than sitting around doing nothing

#tw: school shooting #gun control #american politics

[arwyd]

Sunday always comes. Resurrection is a promise, and it is a prophecy. It’s a prophecy that came out of the cotton fields. It’s a prophecy that came out of the lynching tree. It’s a prophecy that still lives in each and every one of us to make the state of Tennessee the place it ought to be. So I’ve still got hope, because I know we are still here and we will never quit.

-Representative Justin Pearson (D-Memphis) on the day of his expulsion (04/06/2023) from the Tennessee House of Representatives, for standing with his constituents as they protested gun violence following a school shooting that left 6 dead at The Covenant School in Nashville on March 27, 2023.

#justin pearson #rep. justin pearson #justin pearson (d-memphis) #tennessee house of representatives #tennessee three #modern history #current events #current politics #us politics #cw: gun violence #tw: gun violence #the covenant school #the covenant school shooting #cw: school shooting #tw: school shooting #the new primary documents #justin justin gloria #justin jones #rep. justin jones #gloria johnson #rep. gloria johnson

[cairocreations]

I really wish someone had told me I had a sleep disorder instead of telling me that “Evryone has nightmares, you’ll grow out of them eventually!” And “It’s normal to have scary dreams in your teenage years!” And “Don’t make a big deal out of it! Everyone has dreams like that!”

No. Its not normal for an 8 year old kid to refuse to sleep in their own bed for three months because their afraid of their own dreams. It’s not normal to have to tell people you don’t dream at all because telling them you still wake up crying from night terrors every night is too embarrassing. It’s not normal to have horribly vivid and physically painful dreams about your entire family getting murdered, being hit by cars, falling to your death, dying in school shootings, and killing the people you love.

Please take your kids and loved ones seriously when they approach you about issues regarding nightmares, their sleep, or anything else really. I know my parents taking me seriously and not just telling me to quiet down and go back to sleep would have saved me a lot of grief.

#mental health #parasomnia #insomia #nightmares #nightmare disorder #thankfully working with my wonderful therapist has helped me to develop habit to prevent from having nightmares #still really bad at felling asleep though #text #text post #tw: school shooting #but only a brief mention.

[blatantescapism]

Ah yes, it’s that special day where once again I find myself wondering what the ever-living fuck Joe Finigan was thinking.

This is the story of how I utterly failed to have the appropriate emotional reaction to 9/11. Mind the trigger tags. I’d add more but I ran out. This story is insensitive by nature and I probably shouldn’t share it, but it’s also such a weird slice of American life that I kinda feel like I gotta.

So, context.

Columbine happened in 1999, when I was in 5th grade. Schools across the US started to be like, “hm, maybe it’s time to actually address this issue somehow.” Our elementary school brought in some random police officers to talk about it. Police who, if anything, had been trained in how to make kids more traumatized.

We didn’t have active shooter drills back then. They were just like, “Hey kids, I want you to imagine this fucked up scenario that I am vividly describing. What would you do if it happened to you? Do you have a Plan? Will you be able to stick to your Plan even while your classmates are screaming? You should think about it hard, in graphic detail, so that when the time comes you won’t hesitate to make Tough Choices. Breaking your leg because you jumped out a window is still better than being dead! Listen to this story of a girl who hid under a desk, but then the gunman found her and she couldn’t escape because there was no room to maneuver and so she was trapped and the gunman shot her while she bravely said her prayers, we have a weird creepy obsession with painting the victims as modern Christian martyrs and we totally invented the entire story but you won’t realize that for at least a decade. And remember: don’t run in a straight line, run in zigzags so that you’re harder to shoot.”

So yeah, that was 1999, we were 11 years old, and we took that shit very much to heart.

Two years later, it’s 2001. There have been 15 new US school shootings in that time. My sister and I are in middle school, it’s early in the school year but we’ve started to get into a normal rhythm,

Suddenly there is a totally unexpected blare on the intercom. It’s Principal Joe Finigan, he is about to make the most significant announcement of his career, and for some fucking reason he decides that THIS is the best thing to say:

“There has been a, uh, a terrible tragedy. Everyone should go home now. Uh, ask your parents what happened. As far as we know, we are not a target at this time.” Click.

We don’t have any other sources of information. The teachers aren’t telling us what’s going on, but some are crying.

Obviously there must have been a school shooting in town. But what the hell did he mean by “as far as we know, we are not a target at this time”? That makes it sound like the gunman is still at large. Is this a sniper situation? Is it even safe to walk home? Are we going to have to line up in the office and take turns using the school telephone to call our parents?

We cautiously head outside, and there’s a line of parents already out there waiting in their cars to pick their kids up. Oh shit, it must be bad. Was it the kindergarten? Or the Catholic prep school?

Our mom is upset. She says she doesn’t want to talk about it while driving. She’ll show us the news on the TV when we get home.

We get home and steel ourselves to face the news, fully expecting to see the names of close friends and neighbors listed among the dead.

So please imagine how appalled our dear mother is when we say, “Wait a minute- all this fuss is because some buildings are on fire in a completely different state?!”

“As far as we know, we are not a target at this time.”

Dear Joe Finigan. What the fuck made you say that. Please tell me, did you genuinely imagine terrorists being like

“At this time, our target is the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But next, we shall target a mediocre school in a bland suburban town that nobody has ever heard of! Ohoho! Ah hah ha ha!”

Anyway, there’s something to be said about how after both events, the US response was, “You see, this is why we need more guns. We tooootally promise they’ll only be used to hurt Bad Guys! After all, we’re the Good Guys! USA! USA!”

#9/11 #tw: violence #school shooters #school shooting #columbine school shooting #columbine massacre #columbine 1999 #trauma #tw: school shooting #school shooting tw #war on terror #nine eleven #dead child #dead children #triggering topics #gun violence #disrespectful #lack of respect #inappropriate reaction #violence #upsetting #inappropriate humor #us centric #tw guns #vivid imagery #world trade center #insensitive #american school system #gun legislation #active shooter

[undreaming-fanfiction]

I'm so sorry for even thinking this because it isn't cute or funny or anything, but I have had this on my mind since a moots discussion on Discord about the shitshow that is the US legal system when it comes to guns and violence prevention.

TW: gun violence, school shooting (not described or real cases, just mention)

I see it quite often that people love to consider teaching career for Steve after the whole Upside Down crap is over. And it really seems like that after he survived a different dimension, things should only get easier for him. But with how things currently are in the US and how they have been, do you think he would feel fulfilled or even safe in his job?

Imagine Steve, nearing his sixties, and having to deal with all of this. Seeing a place that he vowed to make better for future generations get so, so much worse. Being told he should get a gun for his safety, his and his own students. Hours of drills, being terrified of what he's going to see on the news next. Not knowing if the goodbye kiss he gives to Eddie in the morning is the last one, but never abandoning his students.

I don't want to get political here, Tumblr is a bit of an escapism for me, but ST covered real events like the Satanic panic so I don't doubt this would be in the cards for a future teacher Steve.

#tw: gun violence #tw: school shooting #steve harrington #stranger things #steddie #look I'm just sorry #but it's been on the news constantly #and I just had to kinda summarize it because Steve would be a wonderful teacher but so many teachers deal with this crap #so...yeah #sorry

[iwanttobepersephone]

There was a lockdown

A genuine one

Ended up being a robbery down the road, and the police shut down the school

But either way

I was not expecting today to go like this

#tw: school shooting #not technically a shooting but it was a lockdown and idk how else to tag this #still at school #in second period now #im ok dw

[courtforshort15]

It's been 24 years since the shooting at Columbine. 24 years since someone lost their sister or brother, daughter or son, grandchild, cousin, significant other, friend.

I grew up in the same county as Columbine, just twenty minutes away. I was significantly younger, still in elementary school, when we went on lockdown. We spent days and days talking about it in our classrooms, and our active shooter drills increased and took on new meaning as we realized that perhaps a school shooting was more possible than we thought.

Since Columbine, there have been 376 school shootings with more than 400 people killed with an additional 1,100+ injured.

127 of those have happened since 2020, 21 since January of this year.

More than 349,000 students have experienced gun violence at school since Columbine. Our children and society deserve better than going to school, a concert, a club, a grocery store, a movie theater, and not coming home.

And if you fail to see gun violence as a serious issue, then I don't know what else to say

--

#columbine high school #tw: school shooting #gun violence

[ankle-beez]

it’s so so so so SO telling (like it wasn’t obvious already) that republicans started talking about implementing gun control the MILLISECOND word got out that the nashville school shooter was trans. actual fucking despicable ghouls

#tw: school shooting #tw: transphobia #this is the only post i'll make about this #angel.post

[nneilperry]

Texas does not lift a finger when children are shot at their desks at age 10, but considers abortion of a fetus an unforgivable sin.

#no this is not up for debate #texas shooting #texas #uvalde #school shooting #gun laws #gun violence #gun control #abortion #abortion laws #abortion legislation #tw: school shooting #trigger warning #womens rights

[snowy-equinox]

Just a Heads-Up

Yesterday (3/27/2023) there was a shooting at a private Christian school in Nashville. 3 teachers and 3 elementary school children were killed. The shooter was killed by police.

The police are saying the shooter was a trans man, as they had he/him pronouns on LinkedIn. The family denies they were trans, but the shooter was a former student of the school, so their family might be that "trans people aren't real" kind of Christian. I'm not sure if they were trans or not.

But Republicans are. They are blaming the shooting on them being trans. I don't know if we're about to see increased violence towards genderqueer people, but if you are gender non-binary or trans, please be prepared.

Stay safe out there.

#tw: school shooting #tw: transphobia #trans rights

[overly-obsessed-fangirl1]

*Edit: I know what Les Mis is. I know what the French revolution was. I never said the whole play is relevant. I’m not saying it’s right or wrong. I’m saying this ONE song with edits sounds a lot like what is happening outside my window. This is not a political post, nor a call for revolution. It’s a reflection of what is happening right outside right now*

I was listening to Les Mis, and realized that a certain song sounded very relevant to what’s happening right now. So, with a few lyric tweaks, I present

Do you hear the people sing? modern version

Do you hear the people sing?

Singing the song of angry men?

It is the music of the students

Who will not be slayed again!

When the beating of your heart

Echoes the beating of the drums

There is a life about to start

When tomorrow comes!

Will you join in our crusade?

Who will be strong and stand with me?

Beyond the barricade

Is there a world you long to see?

Then join in the fight

That will give you the right to be free!

Do you hear the people sing?

Singing the song of angry men?

It is the music of the students

Who will not be slayed again!

When the beating of your heart

Echoes the beating of the drums

There is a life about to start

When tomorrow comes!

Will you give that which you hold dear

So that our banner may advance?

We should not have to learn in fear

Will you stand up and take your chance?

The blood of the children

Will run ‘til you take a stance!

Do you hear the people sing?

Singing the song of angry men?

It is the music of the students

Who will not be slayed again!

When the beating of your heart

Echoes the beating of the drums

There is a life about to start

When tomorrow comes

#do you hear us yet? #gun control #les mis #tw: school shooting

[bettycrocker]

so like theres this game i play on roblox that recently updated and got a whole new thing going on and its based around a magical school for fairies and witches and shit like that

i have a gamepass that lets me go free came and i notice some weird shit going on in chat of some kids roleplaying a school shooting????

genuinely cannot make this up this is a pretty pretty princess fairy dress up go to school make friends attend classes become prom royalty game

#bettycrocker speaking #roblox #tw: school shooting #royale high