A shooting rampage on Wednesday in the US state of Georgia, which resulted in the deaths of two students and two teachers, along with nine others being wounded, is just the latest in a devastating and unending cycle of gun violence in American schools. Police reported that the shooter, a 14-year-old male student at Apalachee High School in the city of Winder, has been apprehended.
Here are some of the deadliest classroom gun massacres in America over the past 25 years. On May 24, 2022, an 18-year-old gunman stormed an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, killing 19 students and two teachers. The slow response by law enforcement led to widespread outrage, with officers eventually shooting and killing the assailant, marking the worst school shooting in a decade in the US. However, it was later revealed that more than a dozen officers waited outside the classrooms for over an hour while children lay dead or dying inside.
In October, the education board overseeing Uvalde schools suspended the local police force due to their widely criticized response to the mass shooting. In another incident, a 17-year-old student armed with a shotgun and a revolver killed ten people, including eight students, at his high school in rural Santa Fe, Texas, on May 18, 2018. Following this tragedy, Texas Governor Greg Abbott proposed 40 recommendations, primarily aimed at increasing armed security on school campuses and enhancing mental health screenings to identify troubled students. Despite the shooting, some students from Santa Fe High School opposed linking the incident to the need for stricter gun control.
On February 14, 2018, a 19-year-old former student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, who had been expelled for disciplinary reasons, returned to the school and opened fire, killing 14 students and three staff members. Stoneman Douglas students have since become advocates against gun violence, under the banner 'March for Our Lives,' lobbying for tougher gun control laws and organizing protests. Their efforts gained significant traction on social media, mobilizing hundreds of thousands of young Americans, yet significant legislative changes have yet to be enacted.
A 20-year-old man with a history of mental health issues killed his mother in Newtown, Connecticut, on December 14, 2012, before entering Sandy Hook Elementary School and shooting 20 children, aged six and seven, along with six adults. The shooter then took his own life. The parents of the Sandy Hook victims have spearheaded numerous campaigns to strengthen gun control laws, but their efforts have largely been unsuccessful. Conspiracy theorists have falsely claimed that the massacre was a government hoax, with far-right agitator Alex Jones ordered to pay nearly $1 billion in damages for making such claims.
On April 16, 2007, a South Korean student at Virginia Polytechnic Institute opened fire on the Blacksburg, Virginia, campus, killing 32 students and professors before committing suicide. The gunman had reportedly idolized the shooters from the 1999 Columbine High School massacre in Colorado, referring to them as 'martyrs' in a video included in a hate-filled manifesto he sent to police during his attack.
Two teenagers from Columbine, Colorado, armed with an assortment of weapons and homemade bombs, carried out a rampage at their local high school on April 20, 1999. The massacre resulted in the deaths of 12 students and one teacher, with another 24 people wounded. Columbine, which has become synonymous with school shootings, was one of the first and remains one of the deadliest such incidents in the United States.
