Quinta Brunson says her hit show Abbott Elementary will not depict a school shooting episode because such incidents are not “realistic day-to-day” events in the classroom.
Brunson told this to Glamour magazine during a recent interview, in which she was asked “I read that some people had wanted you to actually write an episode that deals with a school shooting. You rejected that idea. Why?”
Brunson responded by saying, in part, “I just think about the day-to-day in a workplace comedy, and I don’t think that that’s the realistic day-to-day in the classroom.”
She added, “I say that knowing that school shootings happen all the time, every day or every week, unfortunately. But there are two different realities. There’s the one present in the classroom where teachers are just trying to get through a lesson. And then there’s the outside perspective of us engaging with teachers through the news.”
Brunson then elaborated, explaining her view that teachers are working so hard, just trying to teach lessons, that they do not have time to think about other things, especially the news as it relates to an attack on a school.
She said, “[Teachers are] just trying to do this job. If anything, the school shooting thing is in the background, like, “Fuck.” It’s kind of like, “We got to deal with that too?” Do you know what I mean?”
Various outlets track school shootings but many, like Education Week, include shootings that occur not only outside the classroom but outside the school building.
In 2014, Breitbart News noted that Mike Bloomberg-affiliated Everytown for Gun Safety released a list of “100 School Shootings” that included incidents that had not even occurred.
For example, Everytown included a Tennessee State University (TSU) shooting as occurring on October 13, 2014. But media reports from that day indicate police simply investigated a report of “shots fired,” and on October 27, two weeks after the alleged shooting, WSMV reported that police still had not ascertained whether shots had actually been fired.
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio and a Turning Point USA Ambassador. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal in 2010, a speaker at the 2023 Western Conservative Summit, and he holds a Ph.D. in Military History, with a focus on the Vietnam War (brown water navy), U.S. Navy since Inception, the Civil War, and Early Modern Europe. Follow him on Instagram: @awr_hawkins. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange. Reach him directly at
