The devastating effects of school shootings continue well after the incidents, said experts and educators who spoke at a roundtable U.S. House Oversight and Reform Committee Democrats held Monday. Democrats scheduled the session after the recent school shooting in Georgia, where two students and two teachers were killed. Witnesses told the panel the psychological trauma of a school shooting lingers long beyond the events themselves, the Georgia Recorder reports. “In the months and years after a mass shooting, young people injured or wounded in the attack experience continuing fear, pain, trauma and disorientation, and struggle to hang on to what is left of their lives,” said the top Democrat on the committee, Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin. The roundtable followed the one-year anniversary of the White House's Office of Gun Violence Prevention. President Biden and Vice President Harris are scheduled to speak about gun violence Thursday.
There have been 404 mass shootings this year, says the Gun Violence Archive. Several educators at the roundtable urged Congress to provide more funding for schools to address the long-lasting effects of a school shooting. “There’s not a time period when the trauma is going to disappear,” said Frank DeAngelis, principal of Colorado's Columbine High School during the 1999 mass shooting. DeAngelis is a founding member of the National Association of Secondary School Principals Principal Recovery Network, which helps educators in the aftermath of a school shooting. Greg Johnson, a principal at West Liberty-Salem High School in West Liberty, Ohio, said that even though no student died at his school’s shooting in 2017, students and faculty had lasting trauma. “Hundreds of students heard the piercing shotgun blasts, and those same hundreds barricaded the doors of their classrooms before they evacuated and in random ditches and across fields in search of safety,” he said. “Many were traumatized, though almost all tried their very best to hide it by putting on a mask of strength and normalcy. Our students suffered in silence.” Sarah Burd-Sharps of Everytown for Gun Safety, estimated the economic cost of gun violence as more than $550 billion a year.
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