When Did Active Shooter on Campus Become the New Norm?

On top of the list of items that should not exist is a Wikipedia page listing all the school shootings in the United States.  This has every shooting that has ever taken place at school since the founding of the Republic.  The first 83 years of the United States from 1776 until the Civil War, there were only two deaths of students at a school.  The killer in the one incident was never found while the other was a principal who strangled a kid who had killed his bird.

The schoolmaster had a tame sparrow and had warned the students not to harm it, threatening death. One of the boys stepped on the bird and killed it; he was afraid to return to school but did so. After lessons, the master took the boy into a private room and strangled him to death. The boy's father went to the school and shot the schoolmaster dead.^[6]

From the founding of the country until 1969 there were 68 students who were killed at school while in just nine years from 2000 to 2009 72 students were killed.  From the graph, it is apparent that the  trend line is dramatically escalating with more and more of our young people dying?  For the first 200 years of this country, students were typically killed because of an individual beef between young people or stray bullets from off campus.  Most of the violence on campus involved teachers or school staff who were killed by students for giving them a bad grade or by other staff.  All of this changed in April of 1999 in Littleton, Colorado when two students came onto campus to kill 12 of their fellow students.  We have yet to address this rise in violence as a country and we have not even studied why students have turned toward murder and suicide at such an alarming rate.

The reality is that for the first 210 years of this country a violent death at school due to gun violence was horrendous and unthinkable.  Now, it is planned for with "active shooter drills" and unfortunately no response by our elected government.  We are sending our young people off to school in the morning and they are sent home in body bags.  Our youngest Kindergartners are not even safe as we saw in Sandy Hook, and nothing changed.  We need to hire single issue elected officials who will wake up every morning working toward an end to gun violence in America.

After Parkland, I went through the Wikipedia page and removed all the adults who died on campus, and counted only those under 24 years old (the age a brain finishes developing).  I included suicides and the death of the shooter if they were under 24 years old and died on campus. I reasoned that they were not helped and something in our society triggered this violence.  From the list above, there were 106 of our young people who did not return from school just in the last seven years while six students died in the first 100 years of this country.  We need to work toward a goal of six deaths over the next 100 years. If this trend continues and we do nothing, by the 2023 school year we will reach 100 student dying every year.  This violence and mass shootings must stop.

by Brian Davis
PS: By the way, I looked at the school shootings with the largest number of student deaths and only one of those individuals came from a family of divorce (Umpqua Community College) and one student had their parents die (Parkland).  So, those looking for an easy answer will have to look somewhere else.