Hello, I'm Dahlia Lithwick, and this is a special audio presentation from Slate.

According to the Washington Post's data on school shootings, more than 215,000 students have experienced gun violence since the killings at Columbine High School in 1999.

And that number doesn't even include teachers and other school workers.

Today, I'm talking with three people who experienced gun violence in their school.

We'll begin with Heather Martin. She's currently a high school English teacher in Aurora, Colorado.

But in 1999, she was a senior at Columbine High School, where 13 people were shot to death.

Heather remembers the shooting began while she was in choir class.

A student ran up through the doors and just said someone has a gun downstairs and they're shooting. We all kind of immediately jumped up like probably out of shock and the teacher yelled at us and was like, get down. So we kind of sat down and then the gunfire erupted right outside the doorway. So a bunch of people scattered. I did not scatter. I'm not really sure why I think I just was in shock and didn't want to overreact. Definitely, you know, not thinking that that could happen at my school. There's there's a chance I went outside to investigate what was happening. A friend of mine says that we went outside the door where we saw Mr. Sanders take a bullet. I don't have any memory of that, but we did come back into the choir room and eventually barricaded ourselves into the teacher's office with we put the two desks in

front of the door. There were about 60 of us barricaded in there for three hours. So we heard the

gunfire happening in the library, which is where most of the murders took place. And after three

hours, heard a knock at the door. We all looked at each other like, what should we do?

One of the students was like, who is it?

And, you know, Denver SWAT team opened the door.

So we moved the desks and came like flying out the door.

We couldn't get out of there fast enough.

From there, they did question us and search us and then led us out of the school in

groups of 10. The gunmen had a lot of pipe bombs that they had set off throughout the building.

So the fire alarm was going off. The sprinklers were on. So I remember walking through water.

And when I was walking through the commons, that was very

surreal. It was empty, but there was water and like backpacks and paper plates floating on the

water. It was eerily quiet. I often just sort of think about the, I don't know why it reminds me of this.

It's kind of gruesome, but the scene in the movie Titanic with all the bodies sort of just like floating in this water.

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