It started as confusion and then as we started learning more about the situation it ramped up into like real fear.

And I've only been that scared like a couple times in my life because we had no idea what was going to happen.

Last year, Tegan Nam, a high school junior in Montgomery County, Maryland, found themselves in a situation experienced by far too many students.

Their school went into lockdown after receiving an anonymous tip that a student had brought in a gun and ammunition.

And we heard them talking about a student with a gun and I immediately jumped to like the worst possible conclusions because like people could be dying, people could be getting injured in the very building that I was in and I have no way of knowing it.

Even people that I knew were cared about and so it was just like my heart was racing. I couldn't think straight. I just my brain just kept creating these horrible scenarios.

The suspected student left the school before police arrived and was later arrested and expelled. No shots were fired and no one was injured.

But students like Tegan Nam can still be traumatized by the experience.

We did an analysis of one school year and found that between four and eight million children in a normal year go through a lockdown.

Most of those vast majority of those are caused by the threat of a gun, either somebody saying I'm going to come to your school and shoot it up or shooting down the street.

John Woodrow Cox is a reporter for the Washington Post, an author of the book Children Under Fire. He covers the effect of gun violence on children and says kids can experience trauma without experiencing a shooting firsthand.

Those children are deeply affected by what they endure. They've soiled themselves. They've wept. They've texted their parents goodbye.

One child interviewed wrote a will saying who he wanted his toys to go through when he died in his school.

These kids are not legally considered victims of gun violence by any measure because there wasn't even gun violence on their campus, but it speaks to how this looming threat reaches virtually every student in this country in one way or another.

Consider this. School shootings and gun violence in America can have a traumatic effect on children, whether they witnessed it or not.

How kids are reacting to the violence and making sure their voices are heard in the debate on gun control.

That's coming up from NPR. I'm Alyssa Nadwani. It's Saturday, June 4.

The mass shooting at Rob Elementary School in Newvalde, Texas has parents and students worried about safety at school.

Unfortunately, violence is a reality for many American students. We talked to students in Washington, DC, about their reactions to Evalde and the uptick in other kinds of violence in their city, including cardjacking, stabbing, and shootings, all perpetrated by teens.

I feel afraid. I'm afraid for myself and my family members who go to school like my nieces, nephews, brothers, sisters.

It's scary that school used to be a place where we felt safe and didn't have to worry about what's going to happen here, how we'd be protected there. It's scary.

To me, Robinson is an eighth grade student at Digital Pioneers Academy in Southeast Washington, DC, and a reporter for DCists' youth journalism workshop.

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