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Fighting violence with more violence is not the answer to the country's problem. The statement that the NRA made was insensitive to the students who lost their lives during these shootings. The division between opinions in the United States is making change hard to control.

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The NRA is what has been making it hard for gun laws to be passed within the United States. This group advocates the right to bear arms in the States and will continue to be anti-gun control. Many people who are not in favor of gun control think that having guns will let citizens be able to protect themselves from dangerous people in the world.

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After all the walkouts and protests, the NRA voiced how they stood in solidarity with the students and agreed that schools should be more protected. Later, the page tweeted a picture of an AR-15 that stated “I’ll control my own gun.” The NRA is still standing on the Second Amendment right by tweeting that right after the previous to show that their perspective has not changed 100%.

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Not all schools and students have been participating in these movements going on around the nation. Rural and conservative areas have been more silent on this issue and have decided not to partake in any of these protests going around the world. In the state of Iowa, the superintendent of the Oskaloosa Community School District talked about some of the local reasons why the people of the community may have not participated such as cold temperatures. Also, he adds that some students are not as interested in national issues because they live in smaller cities compared to students who live in bigger cities.

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In many different states, the communities protested. Not only at the schools, but they begin to grow into the streets. At popular places and landmarks throughout different states, people rallied with signs demanding for the violence to end. Specifically in Washington thousands of students left their classrooms and marched to the capitol steps protesting against the gun control laws in America. Even members of Congress, mostly the Democrats, had met the students at the capitol and joined in on the rallies.

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There have been many different ways schools are trying to confront and shine a light on the violence that has been going around in the education system. Students have held walkouts to protest having to run out of class because of gunfire during the school day. Also, some schools participated in moments of silence that dedicated one minute to each life lost in the shooting that took place at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

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Demanding for change was hard to due to the fact that the Republicans were leading the United States Congress. The Republicans are in favor of citizens second amendment rights which make it hard to stricten gun laws ferdally.

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Efforts of trying to make an impact on the nation

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Efforts of trying to make an impact on the nation

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It has been hard for these protests to make an impact on national laws. Our policymakers have not been doing much to actively make gun laws under more control. The Presidents at the time had abandoned gun control proposals making it harder for change in the system.

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Many other students from across the states joined the students from the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in protest. Hundreds and thousands of students left their classes at 10 a.m. hoping for their voices to be heard.

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signs that students held while protesting 

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Young Voices Begging and Pleading for Change 

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Young Voices Begging and Pleading for Change 

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In hopes of making an impact on our country, students decided to protest gun laws themselves because this violence in the education system should not be tolerated. The students used their voices in hopes of gaining empathy from our lawmakers to switch the approach to gun control.

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Students across the country are starting to use their voices against gun violence. They are actively starting to participate in protests to gain awareness of Americans' gun control laws. They have been using their voices to demand change throughout the United States.

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eloquent

fluent or persuasive in speaking or writing

cynicism

an inclination to believe that people are motivated purely by self-interest; skepticism

defiance

open resistance; bold disobedience.

poignant

evoking a keen sense of sadness or regret

inaugurating

begin or introduce (a system, policy, or period)

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Not too long ago, hundreds of teenagers ran out of their classrooms for the safety of their lives. That day, 17 students and staff members were killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. This was not the first school shooting to happen in the United States, and it would not be the last. In 1999, 13 people were killed at Columbine High School before this incident. Over the last few years, gun control has become a major issue in the United States. The statistics of how much gun violence has increased in America's education system have been on a watch. The Columbine High School massacre was the United States' first ground-breaking school shooting. The Columbine High School massacre is known for starting the ripple effect of the increase of violence in schools. Every year following America saw gun violence surrounding their schools. Just increasing as time moves forward. “Since 2015, school shooting incidents in the U.S. have skyrocketed compared to previous decades” making the violence even worse than the previous years (Vigderman and Turner). The Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School was one of those schools that had been placed in that statistics and the communities had enough of the violence surrounding their youth. School is supposed to be a place where parents can send their children off and not have to worry about them being killed by pointless acts of selflessness. “Since 1999, 440 people have been killed and 1,243 injured in shooting events at K-12 schools” (Vigderman and Turner). These numbers are increasing day by day without any changes to the system. Parents are losing their babies before they even begin to flee their nest; therefore, this time around the violence sparked some noise in the community. In the wake of this chaos, students have chosen to use their voices and demand for the change.

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Since the Columbine massacre, there have been a total of 304 fatal school shootings and counting. We have charted the frequency and severity of this phenomenon in our timeline of school shootings in the U.S below.

Click the image to view the full-size visualization

Though it wasn't the first instance of violence inside an American school, the Columbine High School shooting has proven to be a watershed moment. In just the four years that followed the 1999 massacre, more than two dozen others were killed and even more were injured. And the ensuing decades have brought even more violence in schools.1

Another heartbreaking school shooting in May 2022 - this one more than 700 miles southwest of Littleton, Colorado, in the southern Texas town of Uvalde - has once again drawn the nation's attention to violence in American schools.

How Many School Shootings Have Happened Since Columbine?

According to the K-12 School Shooting Database, a publication of the Naval Postgraduate School's Center for Homeland Defense and Security (CHDS), a total of 118 active shooter incidents have been reported at K-12 schools in the U.S. since 1999. These shootings are defined by the CHDS as situations where the perpetrator killed or wounded targeted or random victims within the school campus during a continuous episode of violence.

Nearly 60 percent of active shooter incidents at educational institutions since Columbine have occurred in high schools, and about 21 percent have occurred in middle or junior high schools. The remainder have happened in elementary schools, K-8 schools, and K-12 schools, according to the K-12 school shooting database.

Percentage of Active Shooter Incidents by School Level

1999-2022

High school

59%

Middle school, junior high, or 6-12 school

21%

Elementary school

14%

K-12 or K-8 school

3%

Other or unknown

3%

Source: K-12 School Shooting Database
School shootings and gun incidents have become so common that the news coverage of these events has fundamentally changed, with the Columbine massacre getting months of press and current events only getting a fraction of Columbine's coverage. Some, like the Santa Fe shooting, which had ten fatalities, have gotten less attention due to the fact that other shootings, like the Parkland shooting, which had 17 fatalities, dwarf them.

How Many People Are Injured Each Year in School Shootings?

Since 1999, though, 392 people have been killed and 1,119 injured in K-12 school shootings, reflecting the rise in overall incidents. Injuries and fatalities. At the start of the pandemic in 2020, 77 people were killed or injured in K-12 shootings. This was the lowest number in several years, but that figure more than doubled again in 2021.

Calls of " never again " rang out after shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut and Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. And yet, since the Parkland shooting in 2018 - a period of just four years - 140 people have died and more than 500 have been injured in shootings at K-12 schools..

While many advocates and policymakers hope that these unspeakable horrors will bring about meaningful policy change, the 23 years since Columbine have illustrated the extent to which such transformation is difficult.

Columbine to Uvalde: A Tragic Timeline

Setting politics, gun rights, media blame, and coverage analyses aside, let's look at the history of school shootings along one timeline to get a better idea of the scale of the problem.

There's a catch to how we look at the data about school shootings. If we focus solely on major school shootings by year or on a list of school massacres with higher numbers of deaths, we miss the bigger picture. That means missing the thwarted attempts, the one-off murders, and the high frequency of smaller events between the massacres with increasingly higher death counts.

We miss situations like the school attack in East Greenbush, New York, which only resulted in one injury but had the potential to kill many more if it wasn't thwarted. The student perpetrator has since gone on to praise both Parkland student activists and the teacher who tackled him to the ground, saying he is "a hero who I owe my life to." That was a near-miss that could have been much worse, but those near-misses also need to be a part of the conversation about guns and schools.2

Our list of school shootings in the United States should hopefully leave an impression of just how many small events resulting in unnecessary deaths have happened with very little notice. Hopefully, the list of school shootings in America will show a decrease in fatalities over time.

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A Timeline of School Shootings Since Columbine

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Since the Columbine massacre, there have been a total of 304 fatal school shootings and counting. We have charted the frequency and severity of this phenomenon in our timeline of school shootings in the U.S below.