Planet Homeroom: How School Shootings Went Global and Became a Growth Industry by 2025
The Classrooms of Babel, 2025 Edition
By Our Man in the Departures Lounge
When the first bullet of 2025 struck a smart-board in suburban Milwaukee on a brisk Tuesday morning, the world’s reaction was less gasp than shrug. CNN International cut to a live feed of a Tokyo vending machine restocking canned bread; Al-Jazeera ran a chyron asking whether Korean schoolchildren even have time for gunfire between cram schools. In Lagos, morning commuters scrolled past the headline while haggling over bribes for the last okada into Victoria Island. Humanity, ever the multitasker, has learned to mourn in push-notification installments.
The Milwaukee incident was merely the opening act. By late spring, the scorecard read: 17 school shootings in the United States, two in Brazil, one “possible active-shooter drill” in Johannesburg that accidentally chambered live rounds, and a perplexing episode in rural Switzerland where a disgruntled apprentice baker stormed a culinary academy with a regulation-issue assault rolling pin. (Three students hospitalized, all with minor dough-related injuries—an innovation in low-caliber pastry violence.) The global tally matters because, like carbon emissions, American pathologies have a habit of drifting across borders, mutating to fit local customs, then demanding frequent-flyer miles.
Europe, ever smug about its gun laws, discovered that 3-D printers don’t require visas. German police seized Liberator knock-offs printed in a Leipzig basement; the plastic smelled faintly of bratwurst and ideological confusion. Meanwhile, France—never one to miss a branding opportunity—exported bulletproof satchels by Longchamp, complete with detachable wine-bottle holster. Sales spiked in American zip codes where PTA meetings now open with active-shooter bingo (“First one to complete the card wins a kevlar lunchbox!”).
Asia responded with its usual efficiency. South Korea gamified safety: students earn “survival coins” for every lockdown drill completed without posting to TikTok. China simply renamed schools “patriotic learning centers” and installed facial-recognition turrets that play the national anthem when detecting suspicious gait patterns. Japan, ever the perfectionist, introduced holographic teachers immune to ballistics, though a software patch was rushed after a virtual sensei developed a glitch that encouraged seppuku for minor infractions. (HR has promised counseling pixels.)
The broader significance? It’s not the body count—history’s abacus long ago ran out of beads—but the normalization of the absurd. We now live in a world where an Australian exchange student in Ohio can FaceTime her mother in Perth to compare active-shooter protocols like recipes. “Mum, they use ALICE here, but back home we do the Daniel Andrews duck-and-cover; the barricade angles are completely different.” Multiculturalism at gunpoint, if you will.
Financial markets, those dispassionate savants, have already priced in the risk. U.S. school-security ETFs outperformed the S&P for the third consecutive year, while textbook publishers quietly added AR overlays of exit routes to algebra diagrams. (“Solve for X, where X equals the nearest reinforced janitor’s closet.”) BlackRock’s latest prospectus lists “random adolescent rage” as a growth sector, nestled between cloud storage and lab-grown meat.
And yet, amid the spreadsheets and smart fabrics, a perverse camaraderie blooms. On Reddit’s r/WorldwideLockdown, a Canadian teen swaps barricade hacks with a Ukrainian kid who’s repurposed trench-warfare tips for homeroom use. Empathy, it seems, scales internationally once you add Wi-Fi. The planet’s children now share a universal second language: the metallic clack of a magazine seating, followed by the teacher’s practiced, weary voice—whatever the accent—saying, “Lights off, blinds closed, everyone against the wall.”
So here we stand in 2025, citizens of a globe whose chief export is fear, cleverly packaged with optional gift wrap. The lesson plan is standardized: duck, cover, post, repeat. Graduation requirements now include an essay prompt—“Describe how you would redesign the fire alarm for the age of ballistics”—graded on both creativity and feasibility. Valedictorians cite lockdown drills as character-building; guidance counselors stock grief counselors like office pens.
In the end, the international takeaway is bleakly simple: when America sneezes, the world doesn’t just catch cold—it updates its active-shooter app and thanks Silicon Valley for the push notification. And so the bell rings, the metal detectors sigh, and another school day begins somewhere under the same bulletproof sky.
