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Back in April, I went to watch the movie “Chappaquiddick” with my parents. As expected for a historical film, the audience was mostly middle-aged and older; I may have been the only teenager there. About 20 minutes into the film, the screen flickered several times before going dark. My dad stood up to see if someone had alerted an employee. My mom checked the weather on her phone. I immediately started crying.

My fight-or-flight response kicked into overdrive. I was breathing heavily and shuddering, desperately switching between the desire to bundle myself under a chair or make for the exit. My parents noticed my fear immediately, but had no idea what the cause was until I whispered — terrified — that I thought the lights going out wasn’t an accident. While my parents and seemingly every other adult in the theater were unconcerned, innocuous possibilities never occurred to me. I thought that there was a shooter in the building and that I was going to die.

My reaction seems, perhaps, an overreaction. But my generation’s fear of gun violence cannot be overstated. I was born in 1999, only days before the Columbine shooting. My experience in a world relatively free from the blight of school shootings has been almost nonexistent.