No Active Shooter Drills. No Road Rage Shootings. Why We Feel Safer in Brazil.

There's a moment that crystallizes why we moved. We were back in the US visiting family, and our niece — seven years old — casually mentioned her school's "lockdown drill" like it was as normal as a fire drill. She demonstrated the "run, hide, fight" protocol with the matter-of-fact confidence of a child who has practiced it many times. We looked at each other and didn't say anything. We didn't need to.

The Normalization of the Unthinkable

According to Everytown for Gun Safety, 95% of American public schools now conduct active shooter lockdown drills. These drills — where children practice hiding in closets, barricading doors, and playing dead — have become as routine as fire drills. Entire generations of American children are growing up with the implicit understanding that someone might come to their school to kill them.

The FBI recorded 24 active shooter incidents in the United States in 2024. The Gun Violence Archive documented over 600 mass shootings (4+ people shot) in recent years. These are not isolated events — they are a systemic feature of American life that has been normalized to the point where many Americans no longer register them as extraordinary.

Road Rage: A Daily American Stress That Doesn't Exist Here

In the United States, road rage incidents involving firearms have increased dramatically over the past decade. The Everytown Research group documented hundreds of road rage shootings annually — incidents where a traffic dispute escalates to gunfire because one or both drivers are armed. The combination of high stress, gun accessibility, and American driving culture creates a uniquely dangerous environment.

In Florianópolis, traffic can be frustrating — the island's infrastructure hasn't kept pace with its growth, and rush hour on the bridges can be genuinely aggravating. But the concept of road rage escalating to gunfire is essentially nonexistent. Drivers honk, gesticulate, and occasionally shout. Then they move on. The absence of widespread gun ownership means that traffic disputes remain traffic disputes.

Concerts, Festivals, and Public Gatherings

The 2017 Las Vegas shooting at the Route 91 Harvest Festival — 60 dead, 413 wounded — fundamentally changed how many Americans think about attending large public events. The question "is this safe?" now accompanies every concert, festival, and crowded public gathering in a way it simply didn't before. Metal detectors at venues, security bag checks, and the ambient awareness of exits have become part of the American concert experience.

Florianópolis hosts massive beach festivals, Carnival celebrations, and outdoor concerts that draw tens of thousands of people. We attend them without the mental calculation of where the exits are, without scanning for suspicious behavior, without the low-grade anxiety that has become standard at American public events. The threat profile is simply different.

Walking on the Beach at Night

One of the first things we noticed after moving to Florianópolis was that people walk on the beach at night. Couples, families, groups of teenagers, elderly people walking their dogs — the beach at 10pm is a social space, not a danger zone. This is normal here. It was not normal in the American coastal city we came from, where walking alone on the beach after dark was something you simply didn't do.

This isn't naivety — we take reasonable precautions, and there are areas of the city we're more careful in at night. But the baseline assumption here is that public spaces are safe until proven otherwise, rather than the American default of treating any unfamiliar public space as potentially dangerous.

The Psychological Cost of American Violence

Research consistently shows that exposure to gun violence — even secondhand, through news coverage and community awareness — creates measurable psychological harm. The American Psychological Association has documented elevated rates of anxiety, depression, and PTSD in communities with high gun violence exposure. But there's also a subtler cost: the ambient stress of living in a society where mass violence is a realistic possibility in everyday settings.

We didn't fully understand how much of our mental energy was devoted to this background anxiety until it was gone. The relief of not having to think about it — of sending your kids to school without that particular fear, of attending a concert without that particular calculation — is something that's hard to quantify but impossible to overstate once you've experienced it.