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A gunman's rampage that took at least 32 lives yesterday at Virginia Tech University was not an aberration. Mass shootings at schools in the United States have become frighteningly common. The U.S. Secret Service even collaborated on a detailed study with the federal Department of Education on how to prevent them. Too bad that changing lax gun laws was beyond the study's purview.
How common are school-based shootings in the United States? Between 1994 and 1999, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta documented 220 separate incidents, accounting for 253 deaths. Leaving aside summer and holidays, that's nearly one homicidal incident a week over six years at schools. Yet the CDC called the incidents rare -- perhaps because 15 young people between the ages of 10 and 24 are killed each day, on average, in the United States. The mass school shootings are but a small percentage of this frightening total.
If the frequency of the mass shootings is uniquely American, it is also uniquely American to have a respected public-health authority label 220 school shootings in six years as rare. That lack of perspective goes some distance toward explaining why so deadly a massacre as the one at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., in 1999 did not bring about a nationwide crackdown on guns. (Twelve students, one teacher and two teenage gunmen died at Columbine.) "What have we done as a nation in the eight years since Columbine about this problem?" Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, asked yesterday. Guns are still proliferating. No new gun controls have been legislated. A federal ban on assault weapons was left to expire in September, 2004.
Canada has had school shootings, but they have been much less common, and the outpouring of rage and disbelief has prompted the country's legislators to react. After Marc Lépine killed 14 women at École Polytechnique in Montreal in 1989, the federal government passed gun-control legislation that may have helped limit the carnage last September when Kimveer Gill took semi-automatic weapons into Dawson College, also in Montreal, and killed one student. Mr. Lépine used a gun that could fire 30 bullets, but the 1991 law that followed his attack limited most rifles to five rounds of ammunition, and handguns to 10 rounds.
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Photogallery
Internet Links
- Video: Virginia Tech shooting
- Virginia Tech University web site
- Interactive map: North American school violence since 1975
As of yesterday evening, it was unclear how the killer at Virginia Tech obtained a weapon. What is clear is that it is far too easy to obtain deadly weapons. A CDC survey two years ago found that 5.4 per cent of all students in Grades 9 to 12 had carried a gun in the 30 days preceding the survey. The U.S. needs to address the ease with which so many people, including the young, obtain access to lethal weapons.
Lax gun laws are an expression of the constitutional norms woven into the U.S. fabric. Those norms are not easily overcome. President George W. Bush, commenting through a spokeswoman yesterday, said the right to bear arms is fundamental, and individuals should be held accountable for breaking the law. Accountable? The Virginia Tech gunman did not let the United States off the hook when he committed suicide. It's time governments and society at large answered for the epidemic of school shootings.
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