Not Safe, Not Okay

Students speak out about the impact of gun violence

By Quinn De Vecchi | March 15, 2025

This article is written by Quinn De Vecchi, a student at Interlochen Arts Academy.

The day of my first school shooting drill was when I was nine years old, a week after the Parkland shooting. My elementary school was in Hollywood, Florida, 30 minutes away from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

The first time I hid under my desk, I thought it was a game. But then, when the emergency lights were flashing, I looked up, and there, covered in blood-red light, was another nine-year-old student. He was covering his mouth with his tiny hands, and silently crying.

When I was fifteen, I did my first active shooter drill at my boarding high school in Interlochen, Michigan. In a closed off community like mine, it felt like a school shooting could never happen.

By the Numbers

The truth is, the fear of a school shooting, even at a boarding school, is real. Everytown, a gun violence prevention organization, wrote that in a typical year, around 1,421 people die from guns in Michigan. This is compared to a staggering national number of 45,738 deaths annually.

Stated on their “Everystat” website (which focuses on gun violence statistics), “Michigan has the 27th-highest rate of gun deaths in the US.”

Of those initial 1,421 people in Michigan, 115 of them are children and teenagers. Twenty-nine percent of the 115 (33 children and teens) die by guns used in suicides. Sixty-seven percent of that 115 (74 children and teens) die from gun homicides. Nationally, over 4,320 kids die every year from gun violence.

Gun violence doesn’t just stem from school shootings. Many deaths from guns (especially with children) happen unintentionally. Misfires, unlocked safes, and loaded guns in homes are some of the major reasons.

Accidental gun deaths happen because of the lackluster safety regulations on gun handling. One way that parents and families can make sure to keep their children safe from accidental gun violence is locking their guns. Gun safes are a great way to store guns and keep them away from any unwanted users. Gun locks, locking a gun so it can only be accessed via a code or key, are another way to have a gun kept away without having to invest in a large safe.

Three Codes

Another helpful option is joining gun prevention organizations, such as Everytown’s child groups, Moms Demand Action (MDA) and Students Demand Action (SDA). Both organizations are nonprofits and activism focused, catering to parents and students with an interest in confronting gun violence in the United States.

In the fall of 2023, Interlochen Arts Academy (IAA) hosted a club fair in which the starting chapter of SDA announced themselves. At first, IAA’s SDA only had around five members. Now, more than a year later, there are over 17 of us. While the growing numbers may seem minimal, introducing students to activism work related to gun violence is an increasingly difficult task.

I talked with my close friend, and one of the founding members alongside me for SDA, Soph Stenz, about the threat of gun violence. Soph is the Student Lead of the SDA chapter on campus. She is a senior musical theatre major, and is graduating in the spring. Soph introduced me to a code her mother had taught her years ago in the event of a school shooting.

Soph’s mother, a public school occupational therapist for over 10 years, “wanted to develop a messaging system to communicate status quickly” in times of need.

“The first code was ‘safe and okay.’ So, if I heard something from [the news] about a school shooting, somewhere where my mom was, it’s so I wouldn’t go into an instant panic,” Soph explains. “The next one was ‘not safe, but okay’—which meant, ‘I’m still in the building. The police have been notified.’”

Then Soph says, “The last one was ‘not safe, not okay…I love you.’”

“The third code meant someone next to you was bleeding, you were bleeding, the gunshots…the screams were right next to you. And the next moments weren’t guaranteed,” Soph admits. “I had always heard of gun violence when I was little. But hearing my mom say those words in junior high, and then she’s had to use those codes before…that really started my passion for Students Demand Action.”

Soph does frequent activist work when off campus, and plans to dedicate her time in college to SDA and protesting gun violence.

It Can Happen to Anyone

SDA’s club advisor is also IAA’s Instructor of History and Political Science, Brian McCall. McCall has been working at IAA since 1998. He has taught at a myriad of colleges, has served as the president of the Benzie Area Historical Society Board of Directors, the vice president of the Traverse Area Historical Society, and as the board secretary of the Michigan Legacy Art Park.

“In my first year of teaching…we had just gotten TVs installed in classrooms. And I turned on the TV in between classes, and this was in the spring of 1999, and the mass murder at Columbine was happening,” McCall tells me. “I was teaching a political science class, so I was torn…‘Should I turn off the TV and start class?’ and then the kids walked in, and we’d never seen anything like this.”

“But I made a decision to keep the TV on, and we just sat and watched it. We watched the kids be evacuated…It was very sobering,” McCall says. “But it also always seemed that most Americans viewed gun violence as an ‘African American poverty problem.’ And then this shooting happens at this upper-middle-class high school with a bunch of white kids running around.”

McCall continues, “This was something, for a lot of my students in 1999, that they could not imagine that that was happening because they had come from schools that looked like that to come to this school. ‘This was something that seemed to happen to other people, to African American people, to Hispanic people, to poor people. It didn’t happen to middle class white people.’ Well—it’s very American now. It happens to all kinds of people.”

Unfortunately, a few hours after McCall and I had done our interview, there was a shooting at Antioch High School in Nashville, Tennessee. Two students were taken to the hospital, and Josselin Corea Escalante, a 16-year-old girl, died from her injuries.

“Another American day, another school shooting. We’ve normalized these events, made them the same as natural disasters like floods and tornadoes, and have given up trying to prevent them,” McCall wrote to me in an email a few days later. “All the lockdowns and hardening of schools avoids the central issue: easy access to guns. That’s the only difference between America and every other nation—including Canada, which actually has a higher percentage of handgun owners than us.”

Easily Preventable

Of course, school shootings aren’t the only dangers students face from guns.

After speaking with McCall, I decided to talk with another close friend of mine, Alisha McMillan. Alisha is a junior creative writing major at IAA and a member of the SDA chapter on campus. She’s lived in Suttons Bay her entire life, and drives to IAA every morning for school.

“In my freshman year of high school, I think it was September 26,” Alisha started when I had asked her about her personal experiences with gun violence, “my cousin killed herself with a gun.”

“And that really shook me. I didn’t grow up with guns…realizing that someone could have that much easy access to a gun was very unknown to me.”

Alisha spends her time in SDA advocating for more gun safety measures. “The worst part was that I felt like it was easily preventable. She was in therapy. Everyone knew she was suicidal, but they still let her get access to a gun.”

In addition to her involvement with SDA, Alisha frequently joins gun prevention protests in town.

“Students’ voices matter,” Alisha says. “Rather than standing by and waiting for the next school shooting to happen, we could end it.”

She concludes, “Because, you know, with more gun safety, and if my cousin couldn’t have gotten a gun—maybe she would still be here. And it’s so heartbreaking that it could have been that simple. But because of the society we live in, that wasn’t the case.”

Students Demand Action at Interlochen hopes to continue educating students and faculty on gun violence, while also working with Traverse City to focus on a safer, and more gun-restricted, Michigan. If you are interested in working with an SDA or MDA group, you can visit Everytown’s website at everytown.org/actions for more information.

Photo courtesy of Students Demand Action; Don't Look Away protest.