For decades, Americans have lived in a country with high rates of gun ownership, including semiautomatic firearms — a pattern that has been stable since at least the 1970s. Yet the rise in school shootings is a much more recent phenomenon.
Since the Columbine attack in 1999, there have been 417 incidents of gun violence in U.S. schools, with a sharp increase after 2018. During that same period, overall nonfatal firearm violence in the U.S. actually fell by 72% between 1993 and 2023.
Those facts make one thing clear: the guns themselves aren’t the new variable. The cultural, social and environmental conditions around young people have shifted, not the basic availability of firearms. Guns aren’t disappearing from American life, so any serious attempt to reduce school violence has to focus on what actually changed — not the tool that has been present all along.
Darrell Kerby
Bonners Ferry