“I didn’t realize how normalized it was, how unafraid I was of it,” she says. She was worried, of course, but in her experience, security measures such as these just meant being cooped up for an hour or two and then carrying on as usual. “Seeing the reaction of people really opened my eyes a little bit more to ... how this affects others,” Alvarez says. “For a lot of students, this was their first run-in with gun violence ever in their life. I can see how that’d be terrifying, you know?”

One ever-present feature of the college campus in the age of school shootings is regular texts and emails from the campus emergency-alert system. When an emergency-siren system in Williamsburg, Virginia, is being tested, for example, William & Mary students receive a brief Heads-up; no action necessary text message. When campus buildings are closed due to inclement weather, students are also alerted via text. And when a shooting happened near campus a few years ago, students learned of it through that same text-message system. “We got a message saying shots had been fired outside this restaurant and that we should stay away,” Grave remembers.

In moments of crisis, though, some students have found their campus emergency-alert systems less than helpful. Maddie Wu, a sophomore at Princeton, stayed on campus during spring break earlier this year, and found herself locked in and bewildered when a breakfast café she’d visited one morning was put on lockdown due to an active-shooter situation at a Panera two doors down. “I was kind of waiting for one of the mass texts or mass phone calls from the school,” she says, “but I finally ... got a sense of what was going on from Twitter.” Alvarez says she found out that the Dartmouth campus was on lockdown from a friend who’d called repeatedly and then texted during the play Alvarez was watching. She received the school’s official message only after the show had ended—by which time many of the students had already been alerted by friends and social media.

Many older adults, whose education took place in a time when schools felt safer, are alarmed at the new norms on campus—and none probably more so than the students’ parents. Rhym says that his mother gets the automatic alerts from Morehouse and “she worries.” “She doesn’t like it,” he says. “It makes her anxious to get alerts about crimes around the area.” Wu says that her parents were “freaked out” when they learned she’d been down the block from an active-shooter situation. Alvarez contemplated whether to call her mother during the lockdown at Dartmouth. “I didn’t know enough information yet. I didn’t want to call her and be like, ‘By the way, there’s an active shooter out on campus,’” she says.

Grave, too, gets the occasional phone call from Portugal after an incident near William & Mary. “[My dad will] call and be like, ‘Hey, is everything okay? I saw this on the news; just wanted to check in.’

“Thankfully, I have not been in the direct path of a school shooting, or a shooting in a public place,” she adds. But she worries that one day her dad will have to call and make sure she’s okay in the wake of something more serious. “All these shootings are becoming so mundane,” she says. “There’s no particular reason that this time it was Pepperdine instead of William & Mary.”

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