Inside America 
  When you read the news from America, you may think to yourself, What on earth are these people doing? I’ve stopped reading articles about school shootings because there are just too many of them. During quarantine, there was no news about any of this, and then when the shootings started up again, everyone was like, “Oh, it’s back to normal now.” School shootings are normal in America.  
  When I was five or six years old a bomb was found outside of my elementary school. We had to evacuate the building. Someone was parked just outside the school yard and a bomb was found in their trunk. My mom and I couldn’t go home for a couple of hours because our house was an hour away and our car was parked in the school yard.  
  As a young child, we had to practice in case of school shootings. I realized when I moved to Europe that not everyone did that. Our teachers would have us turn off the lights and we would all huddle in the bathroom away from the window. “Now, we must stay quiet, stay away from windows and doors because they could break in through those. Don’t move until a teacher tells you too,” we were told. I liked doing those drills because for a few minutes we just got to sit in complete darkness and silence. I didn’t completely understand the point of this. We were just a bunch of kids, what could people possibly want from us?  
  They wanted to kill us, I realized later. 
  When I was maybe ten, my dad was threatened by the father of one of our students. Let's call the dad Braden. The student was staying after school because Braden hadn’t come to pick him up, so my dad was watching the kid. Then, of course, Braden came driving up in his truck, looking quite drunk from what I recall. Me, my sisters, and our friend were ushered into the school’s office so we couldn’t see what was going on. Little did they know the door had a peephole and we opened it a crack. I’m sure we looked quite ridiculous standing on our tiptoes and bending at weird angles, but we did what it took.  
  “Now listen, you should leave my son alone, okay?” Braden was yelling, spittle flying into his wispy, nearly nonexistent beard. Something along those lines, with a lot of cuss words thrown in. He continued yelling at my dad, who was unfazed. 
  “All I was doing was looking after him while waiting for you,” my dad calmly explained.  
Braden was still yelling. “No, you leave my son alone!” His eyes bulged, and they were already quite large to begin with. I was afraid they would pop out of his head. He then threatened to go home and get his rifle and shoot the place up, or something along those lines. One of the office ladies, a family friend of ours, pulled out her phone and called the police, telling Braden to leave. Braden happened to be her brother-in-law. We all knew that he had guns at home, many of them, and wouldn’t hesitate to use them.  
  The government is willing to give guns to people like him, so do they really not expect to have school shootings? I wondered while exchanging looks with my sisters and our friend. Since I lived in a town of barely four hundred people in the middle of nowhere, there wasn’t much danger of school shootings, but when there are people like Braden you still have to be careful. 
  When we moved to Tirana, Albania, it was the biggest city I had ever lived in. But I wasn’t told to stay inside or not go anywhere by myself. I was allowed to go down to the bakery by myself, to take walks to the park (because we weren’t in a desert anymore, so there was actual grass), to walk ahead when I was out with my family. We didn’t even have to practice what to do in case of a school shooting. I was reminded of something my dad had said to our friends back in Nevada.  
  “Did you hear about the school shooting in Albania?”  
  “What? No.” 
  “Yeah, me neither.”  
  America is one of the most influential countries, but sometimes things happen that make you wonder if it should be. Should be people really be following the example America sets? In some ways, yes, for sure, but in others... maybe not. There’s a reason I don’t really like being American, a reason I tell people that I’m a citizen of three countries and try to make them think I’m less American than I really am. My mom’s mom is from Germany, and my mom’s dad was from Italy, so I’m some of both. Unfortunately, my dad is pure American. His family has been in America for at least five generations. There are good things about America, sure, but bad often seem to outweigh them, which is why I like to tell people I’m only part American.  
   America seems to be the root of everything that other countries do, and it’s almost seen as the “promised land,” to some people.  What people living outside the U.S. often don’t understand is that America isn’t as glamorous as it may seem, as seen in the school shooting situation. It’s sometimes quite the opposite. Bad things can happen there – there's a reason people are afraid to walk alone at night, a reason we have to do school shooter drills.  
 People in America and from America have become immune to seeing/hearing of things like school shootings. When I was younger these things used to be shocking to hear about. I used to feel scared about them, but now it seems like just another day in America.