CNN, by Alex Matthews, Amy O’Kruk and Annette Choi: There have been at least 50 school shootings in the United States so far this year, as of September 19. Thirteen were on college campuses, and 37 were on K-12 school grounds. The incidents left 24 people dead and at least 66 other victims injured, according to CNN’s analysis of events reported by the Gun Violence Archive, Education Week and Everytown for Gun Safety.
CNN cross checks these reports of school shootings against school and police accounts and media reports. All incidents of gun violence are included if they occurred on school property, from kindergartens through colleges/universities, and at least one person was shot, not including the shooter. School property includes but is not limited to buildings, fields, parking lots, stadiums and buses. Accidental discharges of firearms are included, as long as at least one person is shot, but not if the sole shooter is law enforcement or school security.
In the first year of the pandemic, when schools were closed, there was a major decline in gun violence incidents on school grounds. Since then, recent years saw a stark increase in school shootings, with 2021, 2022 and 2023 all setting records since at least 2008. There were at least 82 incidents in 2023, but 2022 was one of the deadliest years, with 46 fatalities, according to CNN’s analysis. That year saw the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 students and two educators were killed and more than a dozen others were injured.
Students and educators have engaged in activism around the issue of gun violence, and some educators have quit the profession.
Some states in the south have seen the highest rate of school shootings relative to their populations since 2008, according to CNN’s analysis. Washington, DC had the highest rate — 6 total shootings, almost 1 per 100,000 people — while Texas had the most overall with 61 school shootings. Meanwhile, just five states — Montana, Wyoming, New Hampshire, Vermont and Rhode Island — had no school shootings in that period, according to CNN’s analysis.
Prophetic Link:
“We are living in the midst of an “epidemic of crime,” at which thoughtful, God-fearing men everywhere stand aghast. The corruption that prevails, it is beyond the power of the human pen to describe. Every day brings fresh revelations of political strife, bribery, and fraud. Every day brings its heart-sickening record of violence and lawlessness, of indifference to human suffering, of brutal, fiendish destruction of human life. Every day testifies to the increase of insanity, murder, and suicide. Who can doubt that satanic agencies are at work among men with increasing activity to distract and corrupt the mind, and defile and destroy the body?” Ministry of Healing, page 142.4.
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