Guns And Schools

 Another month, another school shooting in the the USA.

Oxford School Shooting - Michigan ... Just Latest Incident

This time at a school in the state of Michigan, by fifteen year old student Ethan Crumbley, leaving four fellow students dead, and seven others injured, including a teacher. Crumbley's parents were also arrested and charged with involuntary manslaughter.

This was the 138th gunfire/shooting incident on school grounds in the USA this year. It's hard to imagine any other country tolerating figures like this, but as we have discussed before, this is a price that the US seems willing to pay in order to have its private citizens armed.

Now of the 138 incidents, the majority of them occur at schools with a high proportion of Black students ... but as usual this fact is ignored by the woke, BLM campaigns. However that doesn't detract from the reality, which is that 70% of mass school shooters and attempted mass school shooters were white males.

Ethan Crumbley - Aged 15 And A Mass Killer.

But regardless of the colour of the school students, inside and outside of schools, more than 3,000 children and teens are shot and killed every year, and 15,000 more are shot and injured. In all, an estimated 3 million children in the US are exposed to shootings per year.

Its a fact that most school shooters obtain their guns from family, relatives, or friends (which was also reportedly the case in Michigan), rather than purchasing them legally or illegally. The research figures suggest that in all, 73-80% of school shooters obtained the gun(s) from their own family home, or the homes of relatives or friends.

Now in point of fact, while mass shootings in US schools are still comparatively rare, comprising less than 1 percent of the school gunfire incidents, they still account for nearly a quarter (24 percent) of the overall gun deaths in schools, and 12 percent of all people shot and wounded in schools. 

In the US, homicide is actually the second leading cause of death among youths aged 5 to 18, and according to research by the School-Associated Violent Death Surveillance System, less than 2 percent of these homicides occur on school grounds, on the way to or from school, or at or on the way to or from a school-sponsored event, but rather the vast majority occur on the streets (often teen gang related), or at home. And in 2020 Guns overtook car crashes to become the leading cause of death for US children and teenagers.

Data from the CDC confirmed that over 4,300 young Americans died of firearm-related injuries in 2020  and while suicides contributed to that figure, the data showed that homicides formed the majority of gun-related deaths.

These are shocking figures, that must put the US right up there with some of the worst counties in the world for the risk of firearm injury or death to children or youths. However were you aware that women in the USA, are 21 times more likely to be killed by guns, than women in any other comparable high-income countries ... so school age youths are not the only high risk gun victim group in the USA.

In fact compared with other high-income countries, even white males in the US are a high gun victim risk group in the USA (according to studies based on 2015 figures ... it hasn't improved since). Of course while the firearm homicide rate among the white population in the US (at 2.0 per 100,000 of population), it is still far lower than the firearm homicide rate among the US non-white population (at 11.5 per 100,000 population). 

Even so, the firearm homicide rate among the US white population is still over 12 times higher than the firearm homicide rate of the other high-income countries, and the non-firearm homicide rate (0.2 per 100,000 population), is also twice as high. So while the firearm homicide problem in the US disproportionately affects non-Whites it is also a problem among Whites. It could hardly be anything else when you consider that US civilians own more than 390 million guns.

The USA of course has states that have lower rates of gun ownership, where the risk of firearm homicide is considerably less than in those states where rates of gun ownership are still high. The lowest rates of gun ownership is 3 per 1,000 people in Rhode Island and New York state, rising to 229 per 1,000 people in Wyoming. 

These figures are reflected to some degree in the firearm death rates per state, but other factors such as population density and ethnic mix, impact as well.

The three lowest firearm death rates are:

• Massachusetts - 3.4  per 100,000 population.
• Rhode Island - 4.1  per 100,000 population.
• New York - 4.4  per 100,000 population.

The four highest firearm death rates are:

• Mississippi - 19.9 per 100,000 population.
• Louisiana - 21.3 per 100,000 population.
• Alabama - 21.5 per 100,000 population.
• Alaska - 23.3 per 100,000 population.  

• For comparison the total UK firearm death rate in 2015 (including suicide/accidents) was 0.20 per 100,000 population (The Homicide rate was 0.02 per 100,000 population).

So even the residents of many of the low-gun US states, have over 13 times the gun homicide rate as residents of the other high-income countries, and a higher overall homicide rate compared to every one of these countries except Chile. So while it is much safer to live in the low-gun US states rather than the high-gun states, it would be safer still to live in almost any other comparable high-income country. 

This may simply be due to the fact that all other high-income countries, also have far fewer firearms per capita than the US. While the US has approximately 120.5 firearms per 100 persons, the high income country in 2017 with the next highest rate of firearm ownership per capita was Canada, with 34.7 firearms per 100 persons. The next highest were Finland (32.4), Austria (30), Norway (30) ... down to England and Wales at (4.6 - Scotland 5.6), and the lowest, Japan (0.3), all with far lower firearm homicides rates than the USA.

In other areas, the attempts to carry out mass killing attacks on schools can take different forms. For instance Russia has seen a rise in teenage attacks on schools in recent years, with the latest at the Vvedensky Vladychniy convent school. The attacker, a former student was unable to get past the entrance when the bomb went off, or the number of casualties would probably have been far greater as he had planned to set it off at school assembly. As it was, at least eight people were reported hurt, including the 18 yr old bomber.

In September 2021, a Russian student killed six people and wounded dozens on a university campus in the Urals city of Perm, while in May 2021, a 19-year-old opened fire in his old school in the central city of Kazan, killing nine people.