The five year anniversary of the Marysville-Pilchuck high school shooting, which resulted in the deaths of five high school students, is today. Being the most deadly school shooting of 2014, it not only affected the students at MP, but also shocked the whole world. 

This event was very traumatic for a lot of people, those present were obviously affected, but so were surrounding communities like our own, as Marysville is home to our friends and families. It’s a scary thing, to experience death even through friends of friends. 

In the five years since then, gun violence and other acts of public destruction have become increasingly devastating, and therefore a focus point of our society. In attempts to keep the world safe from gun violence, specifically in high schools, a lot of precautions have been taken.

Sarah French remembers consoling her best friend in the days after the event, as her friend’s cousin had died in the shooting. She said that despite the sadness she felt for her friend, “the thing [she] felt the most was shock. [She] was shocked that something like that could happen so close to [her] house.” 

Now, Sarah is grateful that our school takes the precautions it is able to to keep us safe, with the buzzing in at the front doors and the closed campus.

Some staff members here were affected more by it than many of the students, some of whom barely remember it. 

Mrs. Martin was a basketball coach at the time, and the main stress for her was not being able to get in contact with some of her players at the time. “It was a really yucky, but it was cool how we all came together” she said regarding the MP incident. The event was shocking to her, but what was even more shocking was that, “It was never a thought before then, that something like that could happen” said Mrs. Martin. 

While she is happy that Arlington is safer, she attributes a big part of this to the fact that our campus is all indoors, which automatically makes it safer than Marysville Pilchuck’s California-Style campus. “I wish Arlington had the money to take every security measure” she said, describing a school in Oregon that has bulletproof windows and when they go into a lockdown the doors automatically lock and the windows automatically cover themselves. She recognizes that these safety precautions aren’t always enough to keep people safe, but she thinks these things help to make people feel safe at school.

Mrs. Adcock had step-kids at MPHS when the shooting happened. Growing up in Marysville, she has a lot of connections in that community. She is really grateful that Arlington has taken safety precautions since then in order to help keep the AHS community safe. “It was never that I felt unsafe here,” she said, “but I am always on guard.” 

With the bomb scare we had on Tuesday, Mrs. Adcock said that it didn’t really register as similar to the events at MP until she saw all of the worried parents waiting to pick up their kids at Haller. While she understands from a parent perspective that with the situations we have all been seeing on the news for the past few years, she also thought back to the MP situation. “That day, five parents went to the school to pick up their students and couldn’t. We should be grateful that today we could,” she said.

No matter how many precautions we take, in the five years since Marysville-Pilchuck, fear surrounding attacks like this is inevitable. That being said, during truly scary events, like the experience we had on Tuesday with the bomb, people feel more calm. “It didn’t feel similar to what happened at MP at all,” said Shayaan Kahn, a sophomore. 

Most people here at AHS didn’t draw very many parallels from the Marysville Pilchuck incident to what we just experienced, but it was another event that contributed to fear in our schools.  In the past five years, events like these have become the norm, and with that a focus of our government. Laws restricting gun use and availability are at the forefront of our political elections, and schools focus on improving their security.

The shooting at Marysville-Pilchuck was a horrible event that resulted in the loss of many beautiful lives, and we are still healing from it to this day. Marysville is going to have a hard day today, as five years isn’t enough time to heal all wounds, but many of us here are grateful. We are grateful that the events of MP have been a catalyst for change and have served as a real life example of why some of these dangerous problems need to be resolved.