THE SHOOTING AT Apalachee High School in Georgia that left two students and two teachers dead and nine wounded is the latest in a tragic and relentless cycle of gun violence at US schools.
The shooter, 14-year-old Colt Gray who is a student at the school, has been charged as an adult with murder. Police have also charged his father with four counts of involuntary manslaughter and two counts of second-degree murder.
According to the Washington Post, there has been over 400 school shootings in the US since 1999.
Speaking after the shooting in Georgia, US President Joe Biden said students across the country “are learning how to duck and cover instead of how to read and write”.
“We cannot continue to accept this as normal,” he said.
Vice President and Democratic nominee for president Kamala Harris deemed it “outrageous” that parents have to send their children to school worried about whether or not they will come home alive.
“It’s senseless. It is. We’ve got to stop it, and we have to end this epidemic of gun violence in our country once and for all. It doesn’t have to be this way,” she said.
Republican US presidential candidate Donald Trump meanwhile called the perpetrator of the Georgia shooting a “sick and deranged monster”.
Here is a timeline of America’s deadliest school shootings of the last quarter century.
Two teenagers from Columbine in Colorado went to their local high school armed with an assortment of weapons and homemade bombs on 20 April 1999.
Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold shot dead 12 fellow students and a teacher and injured a further 24 people. After exchanging fire with police, they died by suicide.
Columbine, whose name has become synonymous with school shootings, was one of the first – and still counts among the deadliest – such shootings in the United States.
A student at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, known as Virginia Tech, opened fire on the Blacksburg campus on 16 April 2007.
Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people. A further 33 were injured during the mass shooting.
Cho had apparently idolised the shooters at a Columbine school massacre, referring to them as “martyrs” in a video which formed part of a hate-filled manifesto he mailed to police during his assault. He died by suicide.
Twenty-year-old Adam Lanza, who had a history of mental health issues, shot and killed his mother in Newtown, Connecticut on 14 December 2012 before driving to Sandy Hook Elementary School, where he began shooting.
He fired 154 rounds from a Bushmaster .223-calibre rifle, shooting dead 20 children, aged six and seven, as well as six adults in less than five minutes. Lanza died by suicide.
The parents of Sandy Hook victims have led numerous campaigns to toughen gun control laws, but their efforts have largely failed.
Conspiracy theorists have falsely claimed the massacre was a government hoax, involving “actors” in a plot to discredit the gun lobby, most notably Alex Jones.
The far-right agitator and founder of the website InfoWars was ordered to pay nearly $1.5 billion (€1.4 billion) in damages for making such claims.
On 14 February 2018, a 19-year-old former student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School who was expelled for disciplinary reasons returned to the Parkland, Florida school and opened fire.
Nikolas Cruz killed 14 students and three adult staff, while a further 17 people were wounded. He was sentenced to life without parole in November 2022.
Stoneman Douglas students have become crusaders against gun violence under the banner “March for Our Lives,” lobbying for tougher gun control laws and organising protests and rallies.
Their campaign took off on social media, mobilising hundreds of thousands of young Americans – but so far failing to bring about significant legislative action.
Eight students and two teachers were killed when 17-year-old student Dimitrios Pagourtzis, armed with a shotgun and a revolver, opened fire on his high school classmates in rural Santa Fe, Texas.
Classes had just started on the morning of 18 May 2018 when the shooting began. Explosives were also found at the school and off campus.
The criminal trial of Pagourtzis was delayed indefinitely after a judge found him not competent to stand trial.
Following the tragedy, Texas Governor Greg Abbott unveiled 40 recommendations, mainly focused on increasing armed security on school campuses and stepping up mental health screenings to identify troubled children.
On 24 May 2022, 19 students and two teachers were shot dead when 18-year-old gunman Salvador Ramos stormed their Uvalde, Texas elementary school and opened fire.
As families mourned the victims, an uproar swelled over the slow police response. Officers eventually shot and killed the assailant responsible for America’s worst school shooting in a decade.
But it soon emerged that more than a dozen police officers waited for over an hour outside classrooms where the shooting was taking place and did not force entry as it continued.
In October 2022, the education board that oversees schools in Uvalde suspended the police force following widespread outrage over their response to the mass shooting.
With reporting from © AFP 2024
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