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After Uvalde shooting, parents feel there is ‘no safe place’ for children
www.nbcnews.com

After Uvalde shooting, parents feel there is ‘no safe place’ for children

The massacre in Uvalde has led to a shift in parenting as shootings persist in places once assumed to be safe yet federal action to prevent future attacks stalls.

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The massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, has led to a shift in parenting as mass shootings persist in places once assumed to be safe yet federal action to prevent future attacks stalls.

The Uvalde tragedy, which left 19 students and two teachers dead, happened in the same month as shootings in a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, a hair salon in Dallas and a church in Laguna Woods, California.

More mass shootings, including one at a hospital in Tulsa, Oklahoma, have occurred since, yet hopes for passing new gun measures are dim, even after Congress heard harrowing testimony from a young Uvalde survivor who told lawmakers, “I don’t want it to happen again.”

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The alarming nature and the frequency of the shootings have led some parents to feel as though the onus is on them to make changes to protect their children in the absence of a guarantee that their state or federal government will take immediate steps to prevent gun violence.

“To just send my child to school day after day and just cross my fingers day after day?” said Tracy L.M. Norton, who lives in East Islip, New York. “That’s no way to live.”

Norton is among parents making changes that include switching to homeschooling, buying bulletproof backpacks and checking if there are guns in homes where their kids might be playing with friends.

She has always been a proponent of public schools. But after the shooting at the Buffalo supermarket that left 10 dead and then the Uvalde massacre, she and her husband decided that as of the fall, their 8-year-old, Elizabeth, will be homeschooled.

“We really felt backed into a corner,” Norton said, as if “there really is no safe place to have our daughter in public spaces for extended periods of time.”

“If the federal government gets serious about gun control, if there’s a significant effort to buy back the number of guns that are out there, then I think public school may be in play again for us,” she added.

A move toward homeschooling

Norton is not alone.

In Ogden, Utah, Brittney Lee Fox withdrew her sons, Dominic, 10, and Jayden, 8, from school the day after the Uvalde shooting to start homeschooling them. She plans to attend school board meetings to try to get more safety precautions in local public school buildings, but she is not optimistic it will happen any time soon.

Her sons felt nervous about their safety in school when she talked to them about what happened at Robb Elementary School, she said.

“They feel helpless,” Fox said. “They feel so confused, and no matter how we explain it to any child, they’re not going to understand it, because we don’t even as adults.”

Homeschooling had already skyrocketed during the pandemic, with families across the country turning to it over concerns about unpredictable school closures and the spread of Covid.

Historically, school shootings have led to a bump in inquiries about homeschooling, said Jeremy Newman, deputy director of the Texas Home School Coalition, which provides support and advocacy for homeschooling families in the state.