I Thought I Was in a Shooting, But I Was Lucky

By: Caroline Jung

August 6, 2019, around 9pm.

After a mindblowing Broadway performance of The Phantom of the Opera, my family and I made our way through Times Square to go back to our hotel in Manhattan. Excited voices filled the cool night air and the city was alive and relaxed. Or, that is, until that atmosphere morphed into confusion, suspicion, and fright. Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Everyone froze. It was the first time I’d seen that huge of a crowd stop and whisper. Were those gunshots? What did gunshots sound like? Was it a coincidence that we were right outside the New York Police Department? That it was just days after the El Paso and Dayton shootings? I was confused, but I didn’t have any more time to think because someone beside me shouted “run!” and I followed suit. Lingering outside and possibly meeting a shooter was not a risk I was willing to take.

It was the first time I saw Times Square empty. I saw it empty months before the pandemic hit. I saw children crying, people hugging, parents calling. And as I stationed myself in a glass building (not the best location to hide from a shooter), I felt true fear. It was the first time I believed there was a chance for death. What would be Times Square’s legacy? These pedestrians’ legacy? My legacy? I had not experienced this amount of adrenaline before. I replayed the last thirty seconds. I wondered where the woman who shouted for us to run was. I remembered the clear outline of her mouth forming the word, her wide eyes, and index finger pointing us to a direction. I remembered following my mom. I remembered losing sight of my dad. I remembered my mom’s surprised face in the middle of the body wrestling we played to enter the building.

A staff member told us to get out of the building because it had been a false alarm: a motorcycle had backfired with no shooter in sight. But we were all skeptical—are backfired motorcycles supposed to sound like gunshots? How was I supposed to know if I had never seen or heard a motorcycle backfire? We stayed in the building until Times Square slowly filled back up with people. I saw an ambulance nearby treating people who got injured in the stampede. We went back out into the night, reconnected with my dad, and rode the subway back to the hotel. But I could not stop thinking about it for the rest of my Manhattan trip.

This memory still stays with me. I am lucky to not have experienced a real shooting. And through it, I realized something. I had always been for gun control, but I hadn’t taken many actions that would make positive impacts and instead got more passionate in reaction to the event. But this cycle isn’t sustainable. We cannot let reactions control our politics, society, and world. We need to be proactive because one day, we won’t be able to have a reaction. One day, it won’t be a motorcycle backfiring. One day, we won’t get lucky.

So let’s use our luck now.