Meet The Parents Who’ve Moved Out Of The U.S. Due To Gun Violence

While many American students and teachers across the country were celebrating the holidays with classroom parties and performances, another mass school shooting occurred. Monday’s tragedy at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin, marks the 83rd U.S. school shooting recorded in 2024.

After the March 27, 2023, school shooting at The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, in which three children and three adults were killed, former U.S. President Barack Obama tweeted, “We are failing our children. Guns are now the leading cause of death for children in the U.S.”

A year earlier, the Uvalde school shooting occurred on May 24, 2022, at Robb Elementary School in Texas. The gunman purchased an AR-15 the day after his 18th birthday and then killed 19 children and 2 adults, making it one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history.

Dr. Roy Guerrero, a pediatrician from Uvalde, Texas, had several pediatric patients from Robb Elementary and attended the school when he was a child. He, along with multiple witnesses, survivors, family members of victims and gun reform and safety advocates, gave impassioned testimony at a congressional subcommittee hearing on June 8, 2022. Guerrero spoke about the intelligence and “spunk” of the children he knew, but also mentioned how their bodies appeared following the attack, with missing limbs and gun wounds in their chest.

Sandy Hook Promise, a national nonprofit organization founded by several family members whose loved ones were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in the 2012 mass shooting, reported that 12 children die from gun violence every day in America, while another 32 are shot and injured. And since the mass shooting at Columbine High School in 1999, more than 338,000 students in the U.S. have experienced gun violence at school.

It’s easy to understand why parents are considering leaving the country when one of the environments our children should feel safest is compromised by a political stalemate and the cowardly inaction of lawmakers.

For Megan Lawless, an American living in Amsterdam with her husband and two kids, it wasn’t one specific event but several that convinced them to move. After her husband’s company floated the idea of relocating, they began to consider a move out of the country.

“We talked about it, and it was on our radar. And then a few months later was the Uvalde shooting in Texas. I had been volunteering in my son’s kindergarten classroom that day. I walked home and my husband was sitting on the couch watching the news coverage. And we both just kind of looked at each other and thought, ’Why are we here?’”

Moving abroad had its obstacles, but Lawless’ husband is a Dutch citizen, and her own employer was open to her relocating. While the Robb Elementary shooting in Uvalde sparked deeper conversations about a move, two months later in July, the Highland Park Parade mass shooting occurred 40 minutes from their home in Chicago. Lawless began to see moving as a rational choice for her family’s safety.

“We just thought the number one cause of death for children in the United States is being shot to death. And if it was anything else, if it was drinking water or food dye or living next to a nuclear power plant and we had the means and the resources, we would eliminate that risk from our children’s lives. We need to look at gun violence the same way,” Lawless said.

Six months after their move, she returned to the U.S. for a work event. On that day, an active shooter drill was scheduled in her office. “I started having a little panic attack. My heart started racing, and my hands got sweaty, and I thought, ‘I bet I felt like this every day, and I didn’t even know it.’” She equated that anxiety to feeling like “a lobster in a boiling pot.”

Jana Concha presently lives in Stuttgart, Germany, with her husband and their three children. Her kids have never lived in the United States. She left the U.S. at age 28, before her first child was born. But despite the distance, gun violence in the U.S. impacts their family’s choice to continue living abroad.

Concha is originally from El Paso, Texas, and grew up not far from where the August 3, 2019, Walmart mass shooting occurred. “That was the Walmart I went to when I was a kid, the one we went and picked out our school stuff at. My mom could have been at that Walmart.”

Gun violence wasn’t the reason Concha’s family left the U.S., but it’s one of the primary reasons they have no plans to return.

Over a video call, Concha, who previously worked as a traveling nurse, recalled reading an article about a kindergartener who used to wear light-up shoes. The child loved them, but one day stopped wearing them after a school safety drill. And when her mother asked why, the child admitted she worried “the ‘bad person’ was going to be able to find her” if she was wearing her little light-up shoes.

“And it just broke my heart. I thought, for heaven’s sake, that a 5-year-old has to think that way because of a drill or will come home that frightened, right?” she said.

Concha also has concerns about mental health resources for young people in America and their access to guns. Her niece lost a former fiancé to suicide by a firearm. “I had just seen the guy a few months prior. He seemed like a great kid and had his whole life in front of him. But he shot himself in the head. And, I mean, my public health background says the facts are more guns equals more gun violence,” Concha said.

Kristi Booth, an occupational therapist originally from Boise, Idaho, lives in the southern Algarve region of Portugal with her two children. For her, several shootings motivated her decision to leave the country. She had a child in kindergarten when the Sandy Hook mass shooting occurred.

“Since then, it has been a series of events both nationally and closer to home. A work colleague losing her teen son to suicide using a gun from his home. My spouse had a colleague murdered by their stepdad on Thanksgiving over a minor dispute. And I missed a mall shooting where I would have been if not delayed by work,” she said.

Her eldest also experienced a school lockdown when police shot an armed man following a vehicle chase in front of his school. Her son stayed home the following day, but she noticed he became hypervigilant after that event.

“Ultimately, the Uvalde school shooting happened, and we were ready to move. There was no change to keeping kids safe other than lockdown drills and locking doors,” Booth said.

Like Lawless, Booth also mentioned the anxiety she and her family felt without realizing how severe it had become until they moved.

“It was a heaviness that just lifted off us,” she said. “Big crowds of people don’t set off a need for hypervigilance. We aren’t always looking for the closest exit.”

Dr. Lauren Gambill is a pediatrician in Austin, Texas, and is an advisory board member of Texas Gun Sense. Like Dr. Guerrero, Dr. Gambill also provided testimony during the subcommittee hearing regarding the Robb Elementary School shooting. She’s seen the effects of gun violence firsthand.

She has had several personal experiences of firearm violence. “Every family has some story. As a kid, my neighbor was killed in a drive-by shooting. In high school, I worked in fast food, and two of my coworkers were shot. And then one of my colleagues, who was a pediatrician, was murdered in her office. I knew her well and trained with her. I actually took my son for his two-month shots the day before in that office where she was murdered.”

She discussed how gun violence is a multifaceted trauma: “There is an immediate physical threat of gun violence. And the other thing I’ve experienced as a pediatrician is just the profound ripple effects that we see in kids. As a result of increased violence and increased awareness of violence, our kids are truly suffering.”

“There’s such high levels of anxiety, of depression, of fears of going to school. And these broad impacts, mental health-wise, for kids that are secondary responses to this trauma are really harmful,” Gambill said. “We know that elevated cortisol has generational impacts on kids and their families. And I think we haven’t even begun to see the impacts of all of that.”

It’s challenging to provide mental health care for kids when they don’t have a foundational level of safety, she added. “We can put Band-Aids on these fears, anxieties and trauma responses kids are having to gun violence, but until they’re actually safer, none of those things are actually going to solve the problem.”

The children she’s seen exposed to gun violence are often profoundly impacted by depression and anxiety. They worry about going back to school, or in some cases, they even question whether they want to be alive.

“I see kids who have attempted to take their own lives as a direct result of the trauma of witnessing gun violence, by survivor’s guilt they may have, just all of the ripples from that,” she said.

Dr. Gambill said her own exposure to gun violence seeps into her daily life as a parent.

“When we go to farmer’s markets or concerts, the whole time in my head, I’m planning an exit strategy. Which direction we’ll run,” she said. “And I think those things are really taxing on people. And exhausting and really harmful to kids in ways we haven’t even begun to understand.”