Many people are posting the heartbreaking news photo by photojournalist Nicole Hester of a crying child from The Covenant School being bused to safety after last week’s school shooting. The shooter, a former student, fatally shot three 9-year-old students and three staff members before being shot and killed by police.
As with the 156 other school shootings since 2018 where at least one person was killed or injured, the Nashville attack will be met with demands that we fortify buildings, arm teachers and hire more campus police. All of these remedies presume there is simply no easy way to keep armed assailants from storming schools with lethal weapons.
An investigation by the Texas House of Representatives into last May’s mass shooting at Robb Elementary school in Uvalde noted the shooter fired more than 100 rounds in two and a half minutes in a massacre that took the lives of 19 students and two teachers.
In response to the deaths in his state, Tennessee Republican Congressman Tim Burchett deemed the situation hopeless, saying gun violence cannot be stopped. “It’s a horrible, horrible situation,” Burchett told reporters. “And we’re not going to fix it. Criminals are going to be criminals.”
But do those criminals have to be armed with AR-15s, weapons created for war that are now the bestselling rifle in the country?
Must America’s gun laws be so lax that a survey published last week in the JAMA Pediatrics journal found that 1 in 4 Colorado teens reported they could get access to a loaded gun within 24 hours? One in 10 contended they could do so in under 10 minutes.
A week before the Nashville school shooting, a 17-year-old student in Denver shot two administrators at East High School and later killed himself. One of the school staff was released from the hospital, while the other remains in serious condition after undergoing surgery.
Gun advocates insist guns aren’t the critical factor. That is an easy theory to test. Look at the countries without guns. Do they have school shootings? Rarely, and, in many countries, never.
The United States is alone in having nearly 393 million guns in civilian hands. And we are also dying at much higher numbers as a result. More guns have not, as advocates maintain, protected us, but endangered us. While it is true that guns don’t cause crimes, they make those crimes far more deadly.
For example, a police officer in the United States is 30 times more likely to be killed on the job than a police officer in Germany, according to David Hemenway, a professor of health policy at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health who studies gun violence. Why? Because we have lots of guns.
In no other developed nation do parents wonder every day whether their first graders will be killed hiding in a cloakroom or whether their 14-year-olds will be torn to be pieces by an assault rifle during the change of classes. If you look at children ages 5 to 14 shot in the developed world, 9 out of 10 of those shootings occur in the United States.
Credit: TNS
Credit: TNS
The Georgia General Assembly acts as if school shootings are now a part of American life that we must accept. Lawmakers passed House Bill 147, which doubles down on safety drills in schools. In its annual scorecard released Friday on how well state gun laws protect residents, the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence gave Georgia an F.
Neither the Legislature nor Gov. Brian Kemp is willing to take on any efforts to strengthen lax laws that have made Georgia a source of firearms used in crimes in other states with more restrictions on gun access. They are choosing to value the Second Amendment over second graders.
Georgia focuses on fortifying schools with more armed officers and intruder alert systems, treating the symptom, not the problem. More police did not help at Robb Elementary, according to the Texas review. The report found 376 law enforcement officers descended on Robb, yet the teenage gunman was in the school for an hour and 14 minutes. The report said the teen ”had no experience with firearms” and “the shooting was likely the first time he fired one.”
But he chose a weapon that maximizes casualties even in the hands of a first-time user. A few hours before six people were blown apart by an assault rifle at The Covenant School, The Washington Post published an investigative series on the popularity of the AR-15s, noting 10 of the 17 deadliest mass killings in the United States since 2012 involved AR-15s, including school shootings in Newtown, Parkland and Uvalde.
The Post reported that 1 in 20 U.S. adults own at least one AR-15, roughly “16 million people, storing roughly 20 million guns designed to mow down enemies on the battlefield with brutal efficiency. Two-thirds of these were crafted in the past decade — and when more people die, popularity doesn’t fall. Instead, it rises.”
The series described how AR-15s “disintegrated” a toddler’s skull and eviscerated the bodies of the first graders at Sandy Hook Elementary. It used visuals to show how the blast effect of the guns literally tears people apart.
Horrible to think about? Even worse to experience, yet our leaders do nothing to stop the sale of these efficient killing machines. Despite mental health problems, the Nashville shooter legally bought seven guns, including assault-style rifles. And Tennessee — which enacted a law in 2021 allowing adults 21 and older to carry a handgun, openly or concealed, without a permit — is considering dropping the minimum age to carry handguns publicly without a permit to 18.
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