I Asked, What do You Worry About Every day? “Getting Shot.”

And, It Got Worse From There.

I remember the first time I heard a sixteen-yr.-old say: “I’m worried about getting shot… I think about it pretty much every day at school.”  In 2018, when I was running for Congress, I had a townhall with juniors and seniors in high school, we chatted about a bunch of things as a warm-up and about twenty minutes in, I asked, open-ended: “So what are you guys worried about every day?”  I thought I would hear too much homework, chemistry sucks, cost of college is insane or how annoying one of their teachers was. Nope.

Universally, the 70 kids in that room said in one way or another, “I’m worried I will get shot. There are a lot of guns everywhere and a lot of angry people.”

One very memorable share included that day, “…sometimes, I ask for a school-at-home day, because I just get very anxious about it.”

That blew my hair back and honestly, I…