Friday, February 2, 2018

In the Headlines: Kids Shooting Kids at School

There have been a couple of headline stories recently about K-12 school shootings involving minor shooters (a 15-year-old Kentucky boy and 12-year-old L.A. girl). School violence is always disturbing, but the idea of school children shooting each other is especially upsetting. I began to wonder just how common it really was and what steps at prevention we could take short of armed guards. I found some interesting research by Everytown for Gun Safety on K-12 shootings between 2013 and 2015. In that period, an average of two school shootings took place at K-12 schools each month, and, among the shootings in which the age of the shooter was known, 56% (39 of 70) were perpetrated by minors under age 18. Before parents of elementary-school children begin looking askance at their child's classmates, note that it is still rare for a child under the age of 14 to kill anyone, and especially rare for that homicide to take place at school. Approximately 74 children under age 14 commit murder in the United States each year, per other 2017 research. This is less than 1% of all homicide perpetrators. The majority (90%) are boys between the ages of 11 and 14. However, 75% of the time, the child kills someone older, not a school classmate. The older victim/victims are most often relatives (usually a parent or grandparent), adults shot during the commission of crime (usually a robbery or break-in), or victims killed in gang violence. But even one incident of a kid shooting up a school is one tragedy too many. How do we protect children from armed children? The research shows that children's access to guns is a big part of the problem. Guns are the weapon of choice for all child school shooters, about 60% of the time, per Everytown. When the source of the gun was known, more than half of young shooters obtained the gun at home—often because an adult did not store it locked and unloaded. Also, nearly one in six of Everytown's studied school shootings occurred after a confrontation or verbal argument intensified because of the presence of a gun, rather than in spite of it. In fact, the surprise is that more violence does not occur at schools given the common presence of guns on school grounds. A survey by the U.S. Department of Education found that, during the 2009-2010 school year, one in every 30 K-12 schools took serious disciplinary action against at least one student for use or possession of a firearm on school property. For more school shooting research, see https://everytownresearch.org/reports/analysis-of-school-shootings/