Riley Londraville ’27

by Riley Londraville ’27 on October 9, 2025

As a child, you imagined what would happen if a shooter came into your classroom right in the middle of Mrs. Knox’s lesson on long division, and how you would pick up the chair closest to you, and your adrenaline would kick in, and you’d hit him over the head and knock him out, and shield him from the rest of your classmates, and if you couldn’t get to the chair in time, you would stab him with pencils and at least injure him, and that could distract him while your classmates got away, or maybe if he was still in the hall you could barricade the door with the bookshelf and keep everyone calm and quiet until the moment you could all sneak out a window and do what they had always taught you to do in the drills, the drills in which you would hide, trying not to laugh as the principal came over the loudspeaker, “This is a drill, I REPEAT, THIS IS A DRILL,” and because it was a drill and you all knew it was a drill, you treated it like a drill, because how do you act as though your life is truly in danger, and everyone around you could die at any moment, you hide, if you have to, if he’s too close, but if you can save yourself you run, in a zig-zag of course, you can’t be an easy target, because that’s what you are, a target, and if you’re too close, if you run into the shooter in the hallway, your school librarian in a lime green vest and an airhorn as a gun, you fight back, not against the librarian of course, only the real shooter, and you’d be prepared since you’ve thought about it enough to know you’d hit him over the head with a chair, or gouge his eyes out with pencils, or you’d freeze because that’s what you did that one time when you saw him dressed in all black, a ski-mask shielding his face, and his black shoes echoing as he ran down the hallway, and you froze until you found out it wasn’t a rifle that he unloaded onto everyone, but instead 500 crickets in the teachers’ lounge, and if you froze in the most realistic drill, how are you expected to perform in the real deal, when your life is truly in danger, because you’re older now, and you’re not invincible, and your childhood imagination couldn’t save you from the bullets, the gun, and the pure hatred from the man holding it, and it’s only the 266th day of the year and there’s already been 53 school shootings.