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Personal Peace, Security, & Safety (Update)


I wrote the story you see above five months ago. Five months ago, I was thinking about what peace, safety, and security meant to me as a female college student. Today, the unimaginable happened they were. I was sitting with my friend in a café when suddenly sirens that sounded like they were warning for an air raid blared across campus. Seconds later, I got a text message.


ALERT CAROLINA: Emergency. Armed, dangerous person on or near campus. Go inside now; avoid windows.


Immediately, I rushed to find shelter and luckily found myself in a hidden laboratory with no windows and a single locked door. We sat in the dark, huddled up against each other for two hours, listening to the EMS broadcast until the police evacuated us from our hiding place. After another hour, we were released from the shelter in place. Three hours and 13 minutes of fear, anxiety, barricading doors, silent tears, texts that read “I love you,” “I’m so scared,” and “I wish this never happened.”


This is our reality. Gun violence is everpresent in our society, and it is only getting worse. One of my fellow peers said, “Soon, gun violence and shootings will be a common occurrence on every campus if we don’t do something about it.” UNC-Charlotte, another North Carolina public school, experienced a mass shooting in 2019. UVA, another public Ivy, had a fatal mass shooting in November of 2022. Yet, lawmakers refuse to do anything about it. In March of 2023, the North Carolina legislature made it legal to buy a pistol without a permit.


I am tired of living my life in fear. I cannot run freely anymore. I cannot walk to class without my head on a swivel, charting the nearest place to hide. I long for peace and security in my surroundings and I know that I will not rest until that is achieved, and I hope you will help me.

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