NORFOLK, Va. — It's a conversation Nicole Jackson has on a regular basis.
"In my normal conversations of asking about drugs, sexuality, violence in general, it comes up," Jackson said, a family-oriented trained counselor practicing in Yorktown, VA.
She's first hand noticed, and seen the alarming school trend.
"As a therapist, I have no fear of asking, 'Have you seen a gun? Have you ever had exposure? Do you have a gun,'" Jackson said.
Weeks have passed since the shooting at Heritage High School in Newport News sent two students to the hospital with gunshot wounds.
Since then, students have been caught on campus with guns in Chesapeake, Hampton and Portsmouth.
Most recently, a student at Landstown High School in Virginia beach.
"It's a community issue. Schools are microcosms of our community, these kids didn't get these guns in school, these weapons in school. They came from somewhere else. It's something we need to address how young people get guns in their hands."
"As a therapist, I'm thinking about the protective factors this child or student thought needed that level of protection," Jackson said.
What Jackson calls a 'protective factor' is one possible explanation for these incidents, where children and adolescents take protection into their own hands if they do not feel they have any other alternative.
"We would want kids to have healthy protective factors, a trusted adult, someone in the community, family, church, someone in the school. Instead of taking it into their own hands," Jackson said.
And according to Jackson, if a pathway exists for children to access guns, then children may feel less inclined to go to an authority figure with their problems.
"They don't feel as though they can trust to go to the police and say 'I'm being threatened by so and so,'" said Jackson.
The National Center for Education Statistics says as recently as 2019, about 2,900 elementary and secondary students were reported to have firearms at schools.