UNC-Charlotte: Too Close

Shots reported near Kennedy. Run, Hide, Fight. Secure yourself immediately.

This alert — posted at 2:50 p.m. on Tuesday, April 30 — rang throughout the University of North Carolina at Charlotte campus, just two and half hours away from Leesville Road High School.

As one Twitter user commented, “Reading this sent chills through my body.”

I, like many other students at Leesville and in North Carolina, know multiple people who attend this school and hearing this created a pit in my stomach — only to be filled by sadness for those killed (who are not those I know).

This shooting comes right after the synagogue shooting, which was right after the Christchurch shooting, around the time of the Columbine anniversary. But this shooting was too close for comfort.

Instead of learning how to protect ourselves in the event of a bombing like our parents did, we have to prepare for the event of a school shooting. We have to go to school without the full confidence that we will return home alive.

It makes me sick to my stomach to think of all of the students who have been killed, who will never be able to achieve their dreams. The students at UNCC who were finishing up finals, ready to graduate, but no longer can.

The countless numbers of school shooters who cut so many students lives short that can never take back what they did, which a majority have shown they don’t wish to. Although the lives lost could have been much greater had Riley Howell, a student at UNCC not intervened, the fact of the matter is this shooting

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