You are sitting listening to someone speak on stage, or maybe you’re standing. You can’t really hear who is speaking, but it doesn’t matter because you are waiting for the next performer to go on stage. You hear someone near you ask, “What’s going on?” You don’t know but all of a sudden you hear screaming, and 200 pairs of feet begin to run toward you.

This is what over 55,000 people experienced around 7:30 pm on the night of Saturday, September 29th, 2018 at the Global Citizens Festival at the Great Lawn in Central Park. There were screams through the audience, people panicking, some crying. The concern was that someone in the audience had a gun and was shooting. While most Global Citizens staff helped people stay calm, some egged on those running telling us, “We shouldn’t be walking, we should be running for our lives.”

The first police report claimed that the chaos was caused by a  barricade falling, and while that is true, the second report provided more clarity. It said that as the barricade fell, people began to move out of the way, and in turn stepped on the water bottles that were provided at the event. The noise of the water bottles “popping” was the sound that many mistakenly thought were gunshots.

We live in a world where any sound that is loud and sudden can be mistaken for a gun. We live in a world where we are always so on edge about gun violence that we’ve  normalized the idea of being in a situation with an active shooter. This is clearly not okay. Children are growing up with a fear of guns instead of a fear of where to eat lunch.

Boys and girls in minority communities are growing up too fast, and we are all living in wait for the next mass shooting, hoping we are not a victim. This is not okay.

What happened at the Global Citizens Festival should be a wake up call that gun violence is a problem that needs to be dealt with. The day that Global Citizens Festival took place was the 263rd day of 2018, yet on this same day there had already been 262 mass shootings within the year. The problem will only continue to escalate if we do not take action.