At least 19 children were killed in a shooting at an elementary school in Texas
At least 19 children and two adults were killed in a mass shooting at an elementary school in the small town of Uwalde, Texas.
Anastasia Riddle and Ariana Trigs, USA TODAY
- Shooting at school property is the highest value of all time, according to the K-12 school shooting database.
- Indiscriminate attacks on a school account for a small proportion of the more than 2,000 school shooting incidents since 1970.
- Firearms became the leading cause of death among children and teenagers in the United States in 2020.
Children under lock and key. Armed officers rush to school. Parents and relatives in tears are anxiously waiting outside.
This is a very common scene in the United States, where shooting on school grounds is at historical levels. And not just after the mass shootings – smaller-scale incidents in schools are also happening at an alarming rate.
“All types of school property shooting are the highest ever,” said David Reidman, a lead researcher in the K-12 School Shooting Database at the Naval Postgraduate School’s Center for National Defense and Security, which documents each case. when a gun was brandished or fired, or a bullet hit the school property for some reason.
There were 249 school shootings last year, more than in any other year since at least 1970, Ridman said. So far this year, there have been 137 cases of shootings on school grounds, including 39 incidents involving students during school hours or school sports or activities, he said.
An armed man killed 19 students and two teachers at Rob Elementary School in Uwalde, Texas on Tuesday, authorities said. The shooting comes nearly ten years after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and days after the mass shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York.
“It’s different from any act of mass violence or school shootings we’ve seen since Sandy Hook Elementary School,” Ridman said. “It doesn’t matter that the Buffalo shooter’s online diary showed that he considered elementary school his goal.”
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Before Tuesday, there were 27 killed, 77 wounded and 21 with other injuries in a school shooting in 2022, Ridman said. Of the wounded or injured, 68 are students, he said.
Education Week, which uses a different indicator, reports that in 2022 there were 27 school shootings. The publication follows shootings at a K-12 school or a school bus that resulted in injuries or deaths related to firearms and occurred during school. or during a school-sponsored event.
Last month alone, a gunman aimed and fired more than 200 shots at Edmund Burke School in Washington, D.C., injuring a student and three adults.
Indiscriminate attacks at a school where the shooter targets casualties with the intent to kill or injure as many as possible account for a small proportion of more than 2,000 school shooting incidents since 1970, Ridman said. Most are disputes that escalate into shootings, he said.
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Odis Johnson, executive director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Safe and Healthy Schools, noted that the National Center for Education Statistics reports that the number of school shootings with injuries or deaths has increased steadily over the past seven years and is now taller than ever.
While politicians distributed tax dollars to hire more school police after each shooting, school safety policy “did not delay the onset of school shootings in U.S. schools,” Johnson said.
Everytown for Gun Safety, an arms control advocacy group, released a report earlier this year warning of the trend. The report found at least 136 school shootings between August 1 and December 31, almost four times the average since Everytown began tracking school shootings in 2013.
“Whether in class, on graduation, on sports fields or anywhere else, students in this country must live in constant fear of gun violence because gun violence is all around us,” said Sari Kaufman, a volunteer at Everytown’s Students Demand Action and survivors of Parkland.
As gun violence increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, gun violence affecting children and adolescents accounted for a disproportionate share of the increase, according to a USA TODAY analysis of data from the Arms Violence Archive, a non-profit data collection group and a research group that uses a combination of police statistics and media reports.
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In 2020, firearms became the leading cause of death among children and teenagers in the United States, outpacing motor vehicle accidents, according to a recent study using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
This is a unique American phenomenon. Children and teenagers in the United States are 15 times more likely to die from gunfire than their peers in 31 other high-income countries combined, according to the Child Protection Fund.
“Children in the United States are subject to gun violence at speeds that would be unthinkable in other countries with similar situations,” said Josh Horowitz, co-director of the Center for Solutions to Firearms Violence at Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health in Bloomberg.
Megan Rani, an emergency physician and researcher on gun violence at Brown University School of Public Health, noted that exposing gun violence at school can have lifelong consequences for students as well as their teachers, parents, families and wider communities.
“While we see that these school shootings – as well as this daily number of shootings – are increasing relentlessly year after year in the United States, this exciting effect on our own society is not really quantified or fought,” Rani said.
Horwitz said he was delighted with the families whose children were killed on Tuesday as they joined thousands of other parents across the country who lost a child to gun violence.
“I work with some of these parents and the grief never goes away,” he said. “They are constantly wondering how our elected leaders can keep sitting and doing nothing. It is the indignation that increases their grief.
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