Ok. First of all. I want to say that this is not a "kids these days" article. After you're done reading this, you're not going to go to Facebook or your mom friend Cheryl or Fox News and tell them "TikTok is making children violent." It's not. Kids have always been like this. But something is making it easier, and it's not the social media apps.

The news this past week has been littered with strings of threats about school shootings on TikTok. Many of the trends have become widespread enough that the schools have had to take evasive action and even cancel classes, like in Citrus County near Tampa Florida, where administration has been made aware that the district has been mentioned several times in TikToks that are part of a wider national trend to shut down schools on December 17. The trend has been largely concentrated in Florida, but other areas are being affected as well, threats Utah and Puerto Rico increasing as this article is written.

TIKTOK SCHOOL THREATS

(Photo : Heather Mount/Unsplash)

This is terrifying. Even if it's just a coordinated plot to get out of a day of school, the fact that this is the excuse they came up with is an indication of a much larger problem in the US, and it's one we've known about for years.

School shooting threats are the new fire drill. That's not an exaggeration. This is a problem for SO MANY REASONS, not the least of which is the risk that if it happens this regularly, we won't be truly prepared for when one of these gun violence threats is real - and we all know how painfully real they can be. That's why this is happening in the first place.

We can't blame Tiktok for this, because kids have been running scams like this for as long as there have been kids in schools. If scams to get out of school is the art form, the actual rumor is the medium - and gun violence is a very concerning medium to choose, because it means school shooting threats are THAT commonplace.

Just look at this graph put together by CNN:

(Photo : Graph and data courtesy of CNN)

This entire situation is dystopian. We know this is a problem and we just can't fix it. I could talk about Parkland or Columbine or Sandy Hook, but I don't even have to, because I have my own school shooting scare story. We all do.

When I was sixteen, my entire school got out early due to a shooting threat. I knew the kid who brought the gun to school. Not well - I had gone to elementary school with him. He was one of the sweetest kids - I barely knew him, but he actually once gave me a compliment so kind and personal that still gives me strength to this day. He brought his dad's gun to school because he got into a fight with another kid who said he was going to kill him, and he believed it. The whole school was on edge about it when it was reported. I think we were dismissed early. They found the gun in his backpack.

He ended up in juvie.

I'm not here to comment on that incident, or the motives behind this Tiktok trend, because these are kids we're talking about. Kids are too young to be held responsible for the way they are influenced by the culture they were born into - they didn't create it, they're just trying to learn to navigate it as best they can. And the fact that these kids see guns as such a central piece of the culture is, I can't believe I have to say it, A HUGE PROBLEM.

That's what I'm here to talk about. The fact that I'm 26 years old and every single person I know has a school shooting scare story - or worse, one about an actual school shooting. The fact that these teenagers are so used to the concept that they see these TikTok threats the same way our parents saw pulling the fire alarm: A credible way to freak out the adults and get school cancelled. The fact that it was so easy for that kid I knew, not only to get his hands on a gun, but that he found it so believable that the other kid had access too.

I'm almost too tired to finish making this point, because it's one that we have literally known about for generations now. We need more gun control in this country. We're living in a dystopia where every child lives in fear of the day one of the kids in their class will snap and kill them all. It's not okay. It never has been.