Little T Trauma:
How Gen Z Ignores Collective Grief from School Shootings
There’s a strange quiet in the aftermath of a school shooting. The news cycles rage with details; the shooter’s name, the weapon, the motive. Yet, inside the halls of American high schools, the silence is deafening. For Generation Z, these tragedies do not erupt as singular, shattering moments. They pool together, a steady drip of fear.
What makes this trauma so insidious is that it hides in plain sight. Clinical psychologists call it “Little T Trauma”, the kind that doesn’t involve a single life-altering event but instead accumulates over time. Unlike the aftermath of a natural disaster or personal loss, the collective grief from school shootings has no endpoint. There is no rebuilding phase, no memorial that provides closure.
When asked about how they process this reality, most teenagers do not have an answer. “I mean, you just kind of got used to it,” says 16-year-old Emma Kowalski, a junior in Downers Grove, Illinois. “I don’t think about it a lot, but, like, it’s always there. We joke about it sometimes, like, ‘Oh, if we have a school shooter, I’m hiding in the janitor’s closet.’ It’s dark, but what else can you do?”
Emma’s response is not unusual. A study by the American Psychological Association in 2022 found that 75% of teenagers ranked mass shootings as their top source of stress, above climate change, financial insecurity, or academic pressure. Yet only 16% reported ever seeking mental health support to address this fear. The avoidance isn’t necessarily a lack of awareness, it’s survival.
In an interview with Dr. Alan Wolfelt, a grief and trauma educator, he calls it a “protective numbness.” “When a trauma becomes a persistent threat, like gun violence in schools, the human brain adapts by dampening its emotional response. This allows young people to focus on day-to-day life, but the unprocessed grief doesn’t leave them. It manifests as burnout and mental health disorders. We see this in almost every high school across the nation.”
This emotional overload is perhaps the defining characteristic of Gen Z. While often lauded as the “activist generation,” mobilizing around climate action, racial justice, and LGBTQ+ rights, their relationship with gun violence is usually muted. After the 2018 shooting in Parkland, Florida, the March for Our Lives movement briefly galvanized youth across the nation, with protests drawing millions. But as the years went on, momentum slowed. The trauma stayed.
Some argue that this desensitization is inevitable in a society that prioritizes thoughts and prayers over policy. If nothing changes after Sandy Hook, after Uvalde, how do you not give up? Schools are asking teenagers to carry a burden that adults refuse to. Teenagers not ignoring the problem, they are being crushed by it.
The normalization of school shootings has created an emotional paradox for Gen Z. On one hand, many people used dark humor as a coping mechanism. On TikTok, a video showing students barricading a classroom door might be paired with a trending pop song, the comments littered with jokes about “survival strategies.” On the other hand, this same generation can mobilize in seconds, as seen with viral campaigns against the NRA or legislative efforts to increase gun control.
Unfortunately, outrage isn’t the same as healing. Beneath the activism lies unprocessed grief that has no space to breathe in a culture that demands resilience at all costs. To be a teenager today is to live in the waiting room of adulthood while constantly looking over your shoulder for danger.
So where does that leave our generation? Perhaps the most profound tragedy is that we have learned to live with it. It’s not that we don’t care, it’s that caring hurts too much, and nothing changes anyway. Until systemic change addresses the root causes of school shootings, the cycle of trauma will continue. What this generation needs is more than acknowledgement, it is action.