Just More School Statistics

Another school gun massacre in the US ....

Robb Elementary - Now A Crime Scene

What can you say, that hasn't been said a thousand times already over the last five decades .....

I once wrote that "... while they are shocking, we kind of assume that these school shooting events are kind of bi-annual" .... well make that an 'annual' event now. I have recorded these events ever since this blog started in 2007

• 2007 - Virginia Tech University. 

occasionally through to ...

• 2018 - Benton, Kentucky.
• 2019 - Saugus High School, in Santa Clarita.
• 2021 - Oxford School Shooting - Michigan.
  

and now to that roll call of national shame, we can add ...

• 2022 - Robb Elementary School Texas.
  

By that I mean, that I have just recorded the wholesale scale gun shootings that have made international news headlines, as actual gun incidents at US schools number over 100 every year, but usually don't result in deaths or make international news.

School Shootings 2022 Where Figures Available

These are often defined as a K2 shooting incident - being any time a gun is brandished, fired, or a bullet hits school property for any reason.  In 2022, up to the start of May, there were between 119 and 289 recorded K2 school shootings in the United States. Of these incidents, only one had been declared as an active killing shooter incident until this week.

Now 19 children aged seven to 10 and three adults (including two teachers), lie dead at the hands of 18 year old Salvador Ramos (who also killed his grandmother) .... 17 more were left injured as well (some critically), he was wearing body armour and was carrying a handgun, an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle and high-capacity magazines ... all 'legally' obtained as soon as he was 18 (the ammunition magazines over the Internet).

Of course he won't stand trial, as he was shot dead by a US Border Patrol official (but only after he had allegedly been left unchallenged by the Texas Rangers for nearly an hour). Two other border agents were reportedly shot and injured (not critically), by the gunman, and the husband of one of the murdered teachers later died from a heart attack (or grief).

So many lives ruined, by one armed teenage scumbag. But this probably won't be the last such gun incident ... after all it's only ten days since 10 people were killed in a mass shooting in New York, and we still have seven months to go of this year. Guns have overtaken car crashes as the leading cause of death for children and teenagers in the USA ... nowhere else in the Western world can get anywhere near that statistic.

The right in America, especially on the Trump side of the party, are not displaying themselves with any great honour in the wake of this latest school shooting. Take for example, Rick Manning, who was southeastern states lobbyist for the National Rifle Association for nine years, and is currently President of  the campaigning group Americans for Limited Government.

He has already published a piece claiming that President Biden, had  committed a 'bald-faced attempt to score political points rather than provide a voice of healing and comfort', by 'asking Congress to renew what he called the “assault weapons ban” on certain semi-automatic rifles'. He went on to claim that 'the opportunity to look at and learn from the assailant and the protective systems in place in the schools to hopefully create a better opportunity to protect our nation’s children from future attacks by the insane are thwarted.'

Calls To 'Arm The Teachers And School Staff'
Are Wheeled Out By The Gun Lobby Each Time.

 

The obsession of the gun toting arm of the Republican Party, with such ideas as introducing more guns in to schools, by arming young female teachers, to shoot it out with teen gunmen armed with semi-automatic rifles and body armour, that they bought under the lax gun rules, is as stupid as it can get. Schools shouldn't have to become armed fortresses to repel gun bearing teenagers ... they need to stop arming the teenagers in the first place.

Some officials are even blaming the elementary school for not having an armed guard to challenge the gunman, or not having locked all the doors .... can they even hear themselves for fucks sake!? Where else in the civilised world does an elementary school need armed guards and locked doors?

Even the Texas Rangers, who contrary to the official guidance that became standard police practice after the 1999 Columbine High School massacre - which states that the first officers on the scene should do whatever they can, and as fast as they can, to stop an attack, without waiting for backup - didn't directly challenge the gunman for an hour after initial arrival, and initially tried to blame the school (rather than themselves), for having no armed school guard on patrol to challenge the teenage attacker. 

They even allegedly ignored calls from desperate family members, to challenge the gunman immediately, and even handcuffed or pepper sprayed family members who tried to enter the school building to save their children.

There is, maybe a valid argument for hand guns, and possibly rifles in private citizens hands in the US context .... but not the right to buy or own body armour, or automatic or semi automatic weapons. By defending private ownership of these assault type weapons, the gun lobby actually weaken any arguments for the idea of any guns being held in private hands, full stop.

The fact that even if in some unlikely event, all guns were banned in the US tomorrow, 400 million of them would be left in private hands (probably for hundreds of years), meaning that in reality only a limited ban specifically on assault weapons, could ever be successfully implemented. Why the NRA and right, can't just accept that a sensible limitation, specifically on assault type weapons is something that would be a good thing for them, as well as the rest of the country, is beyond me. 

But only the citizens of the USA can explain why so many in the US agree with the NRA and gun defenders. After all, assault type weapons can only be used on people .... nothing else, so why allow them in private hands when they have no other use? 

At least 185 children, teachers and other people have been killed in US school attacks since the 1999 Columbine High massacre, so in all reality, the USA will simply discuss the issue of guns, reach the same old impasse ... shrug its collective shoulders, and continue to teach school children what to do if a gunman enters their classroom ... until the next massacre (probably next year). 

Update June 2024:

Sadly as we have discussed before ... US gun control is ineffectual. The Right Wing US Supreme Court has lifted the ban on bump stocks with a 6-3 majority after it had been imposed by Donald Trump, after the Route 91 music festival massacre in Las Vegas when a lone gunman killed 60 people and wounded over 400 more. He had installed a bump stock on his rifle, a rapid-fire gun accessory to perpetrate America's deadliest mass shooting ..... so much for the rights of a US citizen to walk the streets without the fear of being cut down with machine gun style gunfire.

This news was accompanied by a report by the Center for Disease Control which found that roughly half kept of US gun owners kept at least one weapon unlocked and loaded in their home, even those with children. It also found that guns are the leading cause of death in the US for those under the age of 20 with home owned guns contributed to higher rates of homicide and suicide among household members. 

This lax gun storage comes with risks ....James and Jennifer Crumbley, had bought their son the gun that he used at his school to shoot dead four students, were the first parents of a US mass shooter to be convicted and sentenced to prison .... they each got 10-plus years in prison.

In other news, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the Parkland, Florida, school building where a gunman killed 17 people six years ago, is being torn down .... blame the building, not the society.