(1/4) Watching the terrible news this week about yet another horrific mass shooting, I knew I could not just watch and not try to do something about it. I wondered what else I could say that we haven’t said too many times before. Gun deaths are at all time highs and increasing. pic.twitter.com/kDfjpkpReT

— Sully Sullenberger (@Captsully) May 27, 2022

In 2014, a school shooting happened at my former high school.

It was October 24th, and I’ll never forget it.

I had walked into a friend’s house in Brazil in the afternoon on this day, and she told me to look at her TV because there was another school shooting in the United States.

As I watched the news in Portuguese, I began to tear up at the sight of people I knew.

“What’s wrong, Rebecca?” I heard.

“That’s my school,” I said in shock. “That’s my high school’s cafeteria.”

Five students died that day.

They were dead inside the cafeteria I used to eat pizza in.

Five lives taken because a student had access to his father’s gun, which he purchased illegally from the Cabela’s down the street that we all shopped at.

All the father had to do was lie on a form, and the gun was his.

It was that simple. It’s truly that easy.

Today, nobody even talks about the shooting at my former high school.

Nobody talks about Marysville-Pilchuck High because shootings are all too common.

People are desensitized.

We think it won’t happen in our community, until it does.

Every time a new school shooting is reported, I think about that cafeteria and the round tables I sat at with my friends.

I think about the doors I walked through every day to get in line for pizza and all the kids who probably had to smoosh themselves through them to escape.

I can vividly imagine the space and those doors.

I think about the teacher I know who had to retire early because they can never go back.

I think about my community, which will never be the same.

You think it will never happen in your community, and then it does.

It happens because anyone can get a gun in this country. Truly, anyone.

~