Gun violence at US schools has risen since the pandemic
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The Dec 16 gun violence incident at a school in Wisconsin was just one of several US school shootings in recent years.
PHOTO: NYTIMES
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NEW YORK - Gun violence on American school grounds has seen a notable uptick in the last four years, according to a review of data collected by the K-12 School Shooting Database.
More than 50 shootings with at least one victim have occurred during school time each year since 2021, according to the database, a research project that tracks all instances in which a gun was fired or brandished on school property. The victims and suspects were not all minors.
They include a Memphis teenager who shot another classmate in November during a dispute in his high school parking lot; a teenage girl in Dallas who was grazed by a bullet in September when a fight broke out across the street from her school; and the attack at Apalachee High School in the same month that killed two students and two teachers in Winder, Georgia.
From 2010 to 2019, the annual figure did not exceed 30.
The uptick in school gun violence reentered the national conversation this week after authorities said a 15-year-old student opened fire at a Christian school in Madison, Wisconsin
The shooting, which injured at least six other people, became the latest high-profile attack to terrify children and their families. It came during a period in which overall gun homicides and active shooter incidents also remain above their pre-pandemic levels.
School shootings make up less than 1 per cent of all gun deaths suffered by US children. Only a small fraction of the nation’s some 130,000 elementary and secondary schools report episodes involving guns each year. The incidents are far more likely to occur outside of school property than inside schools, the database shows.
Still, hundreds of thousands of students in the nation have been exposed to gun violence at school since the shooting at Columbine High School in 1999.
Mr David Riedman, founder of the database, said researchers define shootings at schools in many different ways, “but in any one of those measures, the trend line is up”. The majority of incidents that he has tracked were escalations of disputes that turned violent, he said.
“There are more mass fatality attacks. There are more single fatality attacks,” Mr Riedman said. “And there are more gunshots without injury on school property than there have been at any other time period since the ’60s.”
There is no single explanation for the uptick. But researchers who study gun violence believe that the rise in firearm sales over the past decade, the prevalence of unsecured guns in homes where children live, and the rise in people bringing guns to campuses may all contribute to the problem.
“It’s complicated,” Mr Riedman said, “and there’s not just one clear factor.”
In 2020, guns became the leading cause of death among children under 18. A recent analysis by the Council on Criminal Justice found that while overall juvenile crime declined between 2016 and 2022, the number of homicides perpetrated by youth jumped 65 per cent, and their use of guns also increased 21 per cent over that period. NYTIMES
