OPINION: After Parkland, it takes only a few words to cause a whirlwind of fear

By Macy Quinn-Sears
GSS Correspondent

WALLA WALLA, Washington — My town is a red town. A red county. A red culture. My news feed on Facebook is flooded with photos of my friends out doing target practice or shooting at ground squirrels.

At the restaurant where I work, I see guns all the time, on a customer’s hip or under his shoulder as I clear the tables. It’s so common I don’t think to look twice.

But on Feb. 23, nine days after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, my high school was the scene of a reported threat that could make even the proudest gun-toting Walla Wallan’s stomach drop.

It was a false tip that set off the whirlwind. A few students were overheard discussing the Parkland shooting, and one mentioned how tragic it would be if someone targeted our gym during the Winter Wish assembly planned for later that day.

The Winter Wish is an annual ritual at Walla Walla High School, a time when students are able to do something nice for a fellow student — share a warm coat, invite someone to prom, send flowers to a sad friend. One of the students talking about the assembly reportedly observed that sitting in the gym, students would be “sitting ducks” for a shooter.

The parent who overheard the conversation — and immediately reported it to our principal, as we must do in these school-massacre days — later said that she had heard quite clearly that “a student had threatened to bring a gun to the assembly.” In any case, just the suggestion was enough to cause our campus to spiral into confusion.

Sitting in my second-period class, I was preparing to walk to the gym for the assembly when my fellow students and I heard the click of the intercom. It was our principal, Ron Higgins.

“I’m sorry for the inconvenience, but we are going to have to delay the assembly for a few minutes,” he said. “We aren’t ready. Please stay in your second period classes.” For the first time ever in my high school history of morning announcements, a school administrator had just announced something that terrified me

Higgins then started running from classroom to classroom, trying to find the students who had had the conversation the parent had reported. Meanwhile, his message set off a whirlwind for those of us at our desks: Someone had threatened the school, someone was in the gym with a rifle, someone was holding a student hostage … what could it be?

We immediately started texting our parents, asking if they’d heard anything. My parents told me to come straight home as soon as the coast was clear — they knew how easy it would be for someone to bring a gun onto our open campus, and how thin the single-paned windows are that separate us from the outside world.

In that moment, we felt ourselves a step away from the tragedy we’d seen on the news and on social media: powerless, confused, angry. In a word: Parkland.

Anxiety and chaos grew. My teacher locked the doors, covered the windows with black poster paper and duct tape and turned out the lights. Then we waited.

Some 10 minutes later, when we were finally told to proceed to the assembly, everyone was somber, as if a tragedy had already happened. The gym was unusually quiet, and eyes were trained on the armed guards, in full SWAT gear, who observed the entire event.

Walla Walla High School is 3,049 miles away from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, but for those few moments, we felt very close to what happened there. On March 24, as Parkland students are asking us to do, we’ll March for our Lives to call attention to the fear we face as students.

And here’s my winter wish: I hope we pass sensible gun control, a law that won’t take away all our guns but won’t allow them in schools, either.

Unfortunately, that won’t prevent what happened in Parkland. But maybe it will stop another whirlwind from happening here.

—Macy Quinn-Sears is a graduating senior at Walla Walla High School and editor-in-chief of The Wa-High Journal, the school’s student-run newspaper.