A decade before the school shooting at Columbine and more than two decades before the massacre at Uvalde, a man armed with an AK-47 fired his rifle at a crowded elementary playground in California, killing five children and injuring 31 others.
The 1989 Stockton shooting, recounted in “American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15,” was at that point the worst shooting at an elementary school in the country's history. It prompted a prophetic question from a local school official who asked whether “we need a plan where kids are told to hit the deck like air raid drills.”
