The United States of America must make an all-out effort to root out school shootings which are really giving it a bad name globally. In the last two decades, the number of school shootings has doubled.
Is there something seriously wrong in the social system of the US, why does a highly developed country generate abhorrent violent incidents of this kind where the lives of very young children, supposedly in a safe and secure environment of the school, are wiped out, leaving a large number of others highly traumatized.
Is it all due to the mental illness of some individual assailant or due to the easy availability of gun?
More study needs to be done to find out the possible reasons for people unleashing this kind of violence on vulnerable groups of school children.
The US newspaper Washington Post did a study that showed that gun violence left over 348,000 school students traumatized following 376 mass shootings which took place in their schools, since 1999.
The year 2023 itself has seen more than 13 school shootings with six children and four adults being killed and several others injured.
The mass shooting incidents in the country crossed 100 by March 5, 2023.
The latest event which occurred in Nashville on March 27, 2023, capital of Tennessee, was a rare case where a woman (transgender) Audrey Elizabeth Hale, 28, a former student of the Covenant Christian school in Green Hill neighbourhood killed three 9-year-old children and three adults.
She was gunned down by the police.
According to police she was emotionally disordered and was under a doctor’s care. She had been collecting guns. She had a detailed map of the school showing entry points and other places where she planned to carry out shootings.
Besides her resentment to going to the Christian school as a child there are no clear motives present as yet.
The assailants are supposed to have been neutralized within 20 minutes after police knew about the incident.
It marked the 90th school shooting though the 129th mass shooting in the US in the year 2023.
Last year saw 303 such incidents, the highest of any year in the database, which goes back to 1970.
Ilinois had 8 mass shootings incidents this year while California, Texas and Florida had 12 each. Such incidents also occurred in Pennsylvania and Tennessee.
All these guns connected incidents have left 63 children dead in the US and 128 injured.
The fact, that psychological studies point to “bullying” in school being one of the reasons for such incidents as it leaves a psychological impact and desire for carrying out revenge underlines the importance of divesting schools from the scourge of “bullying” which leaves students psychologically scarred.
In the latest Nashville incident, she had two assault-type rifles and a handgun which brings us to the question of guns.
The easy availability of guns (according to one study 120 guns to every 100 Americans) is, of course, an issue in the US and gun control has been debated for a long with sharp divisions in society on the issue. About 44 per cent of US adults live in families with guns.
A large number of people personally own guns and believe that guns would not only provide them protection but bring down incidents involving guns. The simple belief probably is that if I have a gun and you have a gun, then I would avoid shooting you. One generally shoots defenceless people at least that is what is seen in school shooting incidents.
But other studies have shown that the availability of guns leads to more suicides, murders and accidental shootings resulting sometimes in killings and injuries.
An important finding is that most of these crimes are committed by White gunmen though the majority of victims are seen to be more coloured like black or Hispanic.
On average the age group of the shooter is about 16, though you have cases of someone as young as a six-year-old boy killing another child with a gun in the school or a school girl killing a boy for rejecting her.
The easy availability of firearms results in a situation where the rate of firearm incidents is five times higher than drownings.
In 2022 there were 46 deaths in school shootings.
According to an estimate 4.6 million children stay in a house where there is a gun which is kept loaded and unlocked. Most parents remain satisfied with the false belief that their children do not know where the gun is, which is a completely wrong notion.
Most school mass shootings are planned and not spontaneous.
Studies show that despite not being physically harmed the young developing brains of the children in the school and in neighbouring schools undergo trauma which affects their mental health and also educational performance and career for the next several years.
The educational outcomes of the surviving children are greatly affected. There is a drop in student enrolment and a decline in average test scores.
The loss of trust that the school environment can keep them safe is a major psychological impact on the child and increases his sense of fear.
A study showed that the intake of anti-depressants increases in the neighbourhood following such incidents.
Another study found 17.2 per cent of those exposed to shooting in a school less are likely to enroll in a four-year college and 15.3 per cent less likely to obtain a bachelor’s degree by age 26.
The US cannot afford to keep its eyes closed and must redouble its efforts by showing zero tolerance to bullying, not allow guns to be easily made available to anyone, have social systems in place where children can vent their resents and fears in a positively and socially acceptable ways.
| Posted by Sameer Khan | 
