In the earliest known school shooting in the United States that happened on July 26, 1764, 4 American Indians entered the schoolhouse, shot and killed the schoolmaster, and killed nine or ten children. This incident occurred near present-day Greencastle, Pennsylvania and was named the Pontiac’s Rebellion school massacre. After this incident, the next school shooting occurred almost a century after in 1840, where a law professor was shot by a student (Gray). Throughout the 19th and 20th century, many school shootings are deemed as harmless compared to those that have happened recently, as many of those that occurred had less fatalities and injured. For example, the school shooting that took place in Ione, California; on March 10, 1910; no one was hurt after the perpetrator attempted to shoot the principal of the Preston School of Industry (Davis). This pattern goes on until the late 1990s, then there is a huge spike in the amount of school shootings occurring, fatalities, and injuries. Overall, the media starts to label most shootings after 1990 as ‘deadly.’ The first school shooting that is considered ‘deadly’ and caught America’s attention is the Columbine High School shooting where two students opened fire in the high school and killed 12 classmates and a teacher. They also wounded 26 others before killing themselves at the high school (Associated Press). There were even more victims in the Virginia Tech shooting that occured in 2007, where student Seung-Hui Cho shot 32 people before killing himself. However, these two shootings occured 8 years apart, from 2012 to 2018 exclusively, the United States suffered from 151 school shootings (Davis). The most recent shooting that took place was The Santa Fe High School Shooting-that happened on May 18, 2018- had 10 student fatalities and 13 injuries (Davis). In the past six years, the United States has had more shootings occur than in the past century.
The problem in the United States with the increase in the amount of schools shootings is that someone with premeditated, homicidal intentions can legally or illegally obtain firearms, conceal and bring those firearms onto school property without being detected, and use those firearms to shoot and kill multiple students and teachers before being stopped. In the United States, it is really easy to obtain a gun because of the different procedures required in each state to purchase a gun. Many states have very minimal requirements to attain a gun. For example, in the state of Florida, there are no requirements for fingerprints, special permits, or waiting periods. In other words, a consumer can walk into a store and walk out with a gun that can kill a significant amount of people (Hanbury). Moreover, in Virgina, a consumer can “buy a semi-automatic gun in 15 minutes” at one of the leading gun companies in Virginia, Roanoke Firearms (Taylor). Roanoke Firearms is who legally provided Seung-Hui Cho-who fatally shot 32 people at Virginia Tech University-a glock, after he passed 2 background checks. Virgina isn’t the only state will minimal gun regulations, in Pennsylvania, a consumer can buy an AR-15-the semi-automatic gun that is used in most US shootings-in seven minutes. In Florida, it took Omar Mateen just 38 minutes to buy AR-15, days before the Pulse Nightclub shooting, that killed 49 people (Hanbury). Gun laws are significantly different in each state, but generally states require 2 background checks: a state and federal check. There are many ways for a consumer to fail a background check. If a consumer is a convicted felon, fugitive, or was convicted for domestic violence, they will fail the federal background check. In spite of that, 33 states allow private sellers to sell guns without a background check performed on the buyer-state or federal (Hanbury). In the case of the perpetrator of one of the United States’ deadliest mass shooting, the Las Vegas Shooting, Stephen Paddock legally bought all 33 firearms used in the shooting. As Paddock had no criminal record, he passed every background check performed. Also, Paddock lived in Nevada, where anyone over the age of 18 could own a firearm and there isn’t a limit on the number of firearms purchase in a single sale. Nevada also doesn’t impose a waiting period to buy a gun. Due to the different interpretations of gun control laws in the states, it has impacted the students of the United States tremendously.
Since the Columbine High School Shooting, that occured about 20 years ago, more than 187,000 students have been exposed to gun violence (Rich). Many are never the same. Students now no longer feel safe going to school, even kids coming from middle and upper-middle class don’t feel safe. Overall, the exposure to violence can desensitize a child, making them think that violence is a solution to solving problems. Gun violence, especially, can affect a child’s mental health and well-being many years after the incident occurs. Take Samantha Haviland as an example. At the age of 16, she was a survivor of the tragedy at Columbine High school and now at the age of 35, she treats traumatized kids as the director for Denver’s public school system. Nonetheless, she still feels like she hasn’t fully escaped the nightmares of what happened to her that morning in Littleton, Colorado (Rich). For years, the images of little kids walking out of their school with their hands above their heads scared her. However, some students reacted differently to the experience of being in a school shootings; some of Haviland’s students, that weren’t alive during the Columbine shooting, participated in Denver’s “March for Our Lives” demonstration to protest school gun violence, one of the many protests that happened across the United States. Student who lead the protest at the nation’s capital, were still grieving the friends and classmates they lost during the shooting in Parkland, Florida. They led a heated rally where others, who demanded gun control, attended. Not only do school shootings have an impact on students psychologically, but also it impacts students’ achievement levels and education. According to a study conducted by Deborah Fry, children who have experienced violence in their childhood, have a 13% probability that they will not graduate from high school. With the increase of school shootings in the past decade, this statistic will affect thousands of students and their probability to graduate. School shootings additionally affect students in schools that are within a 5-mile radius of the shooting. As stated in a study conducted by Seth Gershenson and Erdal Tekin, “attacks significantly reduced school-level proficiency rates in schools within five miles” of an attack. Evidence of the effect of this statement is most clear for “math proficiency rates in the third and fifth grades, and third-grade reading proficiency”, suggesting that the shootings “caused a decline in school proficiency rates of about 2 to 5 percent” which then causes students to be held back and behind compared to their peers at other schools. Since school shootings are negatively impacting students, the Federal Government should consider to explore new policies for guns and their uses.
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