Blog of an Ultra-endurance Athlete Who Ran Solo Across the USA, Germany, Alaska and Mojave Desert: School Shootings: This Has To Stop!

Friday, February 16, 2018

School Shootings: This Has To Stop!

As a father of four grown children, a former 5th grade teacher and high school track coach, and guest speaker at schools in America and Europe through my youth fitness foundation, I feel mixed emotions when I hear news reports of school shootings. There is, of course, a feeling of heartbreak and sadness for those families who have lost a loved one due to the bullet of a school shooter. But there is also growing frustration and anger with each such news report that I hear. Students should be able to attend school without fear of execution!

I graduated from high school in May 1983. Based on my reading of school shootings, it appears that during the first five years of the 1980's there was only one U.S. school shooting reported -- that being in January 1983 at a Missouri middle school when an eighth grader fatally shot one classmate and wounded another.

According to a recent Washington Post article, since 2000 there have been more than 130 shootings at elementary, middle and high schools, and 58 others at colleges and universities. At high schools, including preliminary data from the Parkland shooting earlier this week, there have been almost 70 people killed and nearly 200 wounded.

At elementary and middle schools, about 60 people have been killed and about 60 wounded. Those deaths at elementary schools are, of course, driven upward by the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut in 2012. However, there have been shootings at elementary schools in seven other states as well since January 1, 2000. There have been five times as many shootings at high schools since 2000 than at middle schools.

The Washington Post reports, "Since 2000, there have been school shootings in 43 of the 50 states, according to our data. (The exceptions: Alaska, Delaware, Idaho, Kansas, Maine, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Rhode Island and Wyoming.) The shootings have taken place at a rate of about one a month and left about 250 students and teachers dead."

THIS HAS TO STOP!