Imagine a normal school day. A pretty easy thing to imagine, a day just like the day before. Mostly uneventful, in a place you should feel relaxed about. School, a place I remember making my first friends, where I had some of my absolute favorite memories. But how has it changed to a place I could have my last ones? This safe place has changed to a battlefield.

Never before would you worry about losing your life at school. But recently, this act is expected to be seen on the news almost monthly. Since January of 2018, there has been 22 separate times children have been the target of these attacks. It has honestly become the “norm” in the United States.

How sad is that? When children should be worrying about their grades or how to act normal around their crushes, they have to worry whether their last words would mean something. What I’m saying has nothing to do with the restrictions on gun laws, but on the fact that children across the nation are the very first generation at risk of dying at the place parents used to trust their children to be safe at.

What causes someone to go on a rampage like that? I do not believe that this is part of their nature, that they were born to be evil and to cause so much destruction. I do believe that as more people continue this pattern of school shootings, it will remain, and the fear will increase. This country has changed drastically from a country of hope to a state of fear.

In the past week, fellow students have talked of the fear they have coming to school each day. It is not obvious whether a shooting will occur. It is so unexpected and no one anticipates being a victim of a school shooting, but here we are, having had another shooting last week, only a few hours from our school.

Instead of these shootings seeming like a tragedy, they are numbed and feel like yet another day. Why has it been allowed for this act to be so lenient? Students cannot be distracted from learning by them thinking they could die that day.

Just this week, I have overheard conversations of students who were so paranoid when coming to school because someone’s arm was hidden under a jacket or a chair fell. Something so simple strikes fear into the minds of people that causes them to think they are going through a near-death experience.

Twitter has given an insight into what our classmates have been thinking sophomore Kylee Perry feels that, “Everyday that [she goes] to school [she gets] so paranoid and [is] literally so scared for [her] life, and it shouldn’t be that way. [It’s] sad that the society we are growing up in has us scared to get an education.”

Today in my college chemistry class, Mrs. Jane Dunn brought attention to my eyes. Not only are we, as students scared, but when she asked what we would do when we have kids, I did not have an answer give. I want my children to have the public school experience, but if I send my kids off every day, scared that they would not come home, that would remind me of sending them off to war rather than school.

“The fact that high school kids have to worry about dying every time they go into school is horrifying,” senior Dalton Teeler tweeted.

With all that is going on, has me thinking we are literally living in a movie world. How is any of this real? We get on the bus to head to war.