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While the grief of the Apalachee High School shooting in Georgia is still fresh, new data underscores that the tragedy is not an outlier, but part of a grim trend.
The number of gun violence incidents on school grounds in 2024 so far has outpaced the total number of incidents in all of 2023, data from gun safety group Everytown shows.
As of September 30, there have been 163 incidents of gunfire on school campuses, leading to 48 deaths and 108 injuries this year alone — and there are still three months to go. In all of 2023, there were 158 incidents and 45 deaths.
“It’s important to remember these aren’t just numbers, these are people’s lives that have been forever impacted by gunfire on school grounds, the last place they should have to worry about violence of any kind,” Sarah Burd-Sharps, Senior Director of Research at Everytown for Gun Safety, said in a statement.
Six of the top nine states with the highest reported incidents of gun violence on school grounds allowed school staff to carry guns on campuses.
Two students and two teachers died after a 14-year-old allegedly opened fire in his school’s hallways after being given the weapon allegedly used as a Christmas gift by his father, who has also been charged with murder over the incident.
Nearly half of states allow teachers or school employees to be armed on school grounds with some stipulations, like training, according to Giffords.
“While gun violence remains the leading cause of death for children and teens in America, some states are allowing educators to carry guns in schools instead of passing common-sense gun safety laws to prevent guns from entering schools in the first place,” Burd-Sharps continued. “If this data indicates one thing, it’s that we have to do better.”
Perhaps the problem lies with easy access to weapons.
Although federal law stipulates that Americans only have to be 18 to purchase shotguns and rifles, the median age of school shooters is just 16 years old, a Washington Post analysis found. Perhaps this inconsistency can be explained by the finding that 76 per cent of school shooters obtained their gun from the home of a parent or relative, according to a 2019 Secret Service analysis.
This appears to be true in the case of the Apalachee shooter; his father is accused of supplying him with the firearm.
More than a year before the deadly rampage, the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office deputies interviewed the father-son pair at their home in May 2023 after receiving an FBI tip that the teen had allegedly threatened to shoot up a school on the social media platform Discord. During that interview, the father admitted that he had firearms in his house — and that they were accessible to his son.
“Students aren’t asking, we’re demanding that lawmakers get their priorities straight because it’s not the books that are killing us – it’s the easy access to guns,” Camille Paradis, a Sandy Hook School shooting survivor and volunteer with Student Demand Action, said in a statement.
But if enduring gun violence tragedies wasn’t difficult enough, schools are now combating a wave of hoax shooting threats as well.
After the Apalachee shooting, law enforcement agencies across the country has been bombarded with a rise in false alarms. FBI Houston officials reported fielding more hoax school threats in the following three weeks than in the previous three years; a Missouri hotline reported fielding 301 potential school threats — almost the amount fielded in the entirety of the last academic year — and a sheriff in Volusia County, Florida reported fielding 54 threats in a 12-hour period — all of which turned out to be “bogus.”
Even when they turn out to be false alarms, threats of gun violence need to be taken seriously — the real incidents are so pervasive.
“The time for thoughts and prayers expired decades ago,” Paradis continued. “I don’t want another day to go by where my biggest academic achievement will be whether or not I survive to see graduation day.”
