YUMENO: Last July, former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was gunned down as he spoke on the campaign trail in Nara, Japan.
Abe’s assassination shook me because shootings are rare in Japan, where I am from.
But here in California, the opposite is true. Californians have experienced a mass shooting every six days in 2023, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.
And health authorities are sounding the alarm. President Biden and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy call the current tsunami of gun violence an epidemic.
It’s not hard to see why: More than 21,000 people have died in gun-related events in the United States this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
That means – on average – shootings happen more than once a day.
That fact made me feel as though the next victim may be myself or people around me.
I don’t feel safe. And neither do most of you.
Scientific American reports that almost 80 percent of Americans say they are stressed over the possibility of a mass shooting. And a third of Americans don’t go to public places because of these worries.
If we’re in a gun violence pandemic, then it makes sense to prepare for it.
That’s why I welcomed the opportunity to attend a mass shooting survival training at Deanza College in Cupertino, where I’m a journalism student.
I couldn’t attend the training in May. But I still wanted to find out how to protect myself. So I found a San Jose Police Department training video.
It was called: “Run, Hide, and Defend.”
“School shootings are a tragic event that can happen anywhere. An active shooter is a person that actively engages in killing or attempting to kill people when it confined and populated area active shooters primarily use firearms and there is no pattern or method to their selection of victims …”
YUMENO: The officer narrating the video says to run away from the sound of the gunshots … and if you can’t, hide.
SAN JOSE POLICE RUN HIDE DEFEND YOUTUBE VIDEO: Barricade yourself into the space you’re in. Make the room dark. Turn off your cell phones.
YUMENO: If the shooter enters, and all else fails, tackle them.
A slide in the video said: “Plan and prepare ahead of time. Be aware of your environment.”
Now, wherever I go, I check where the exits are. That’s the least I can do.
I believe that all people in this country now must keep training against active shooters. The number of mass-uh-cars in the U.S. has been increasing at a record-breaking pace.
I’m heartbroken whenever I hear news of another mass shooting. But I also don’t want to be a victim. We have to face our grim reality.
Politicians can pass all the laws they want, but the fact is that more guns exist in the United States than humans.
And as we all saw with Prime Minister Abe’s shooter, people can now make their own guns.
To protect ourselves, everyone should attend a safety training to learn what they need to do to survive a mass shooting.
We need to learn how to cooperate with each other when a shooting happens.
No one knows when and where shootings will happen. So we need react instinctively when something does happen.
Let’s face reality, and prepare together.
In San Jose, I’m Yumeno Matsuo.