Another week, another school shooting. The shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida is the eighth school shooting resulting in death or injury this year, yet we have only completed seven weeks. It is, according to the Gun Violence Archive, the 1,607th mass shooting since the rampage of Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, widely thought to have been the country’s best hope at changing gun control laws.
It didn’t. And gun violence in schools continues.
But in the midst of the gun control debate, it can be easy to forget that there are humans—often children—who have borne witness to terrifying nightmarish scenes that will haunt them for the rest of their lives. What will happen to them?
While much research has been done into the minds and motives of mass shooters, the psychology of school shooting survivors is in its infancy—though the rate and increasing population of subjects means that it is a burgeoning field. According to The Washington Post, there are more than 150,000 school shooting survivors since the Columbine High School massacre of 1999, considered to be the first of modern school mass shootings.