This appeared in Saturday's Washington Post.
Hours after a student at an Arizona university was fatally shot and three others were wounded, the college president sought to reassure the community. "An isolated and unprecedented incident," Northern Arizona University President Rita Cheng said of the early Friday morning shooting. If only her words were true. Sadly, U.S. school shootings are anything but isolated and unprecedented. They occur on average more than once a week.
This week, it was Cheng's sad duty to hold the news conference that has become one of the rituals of school shootings. "A terrible tragedy. . . . Our hearts are heavy," she said at the Flagstaff campus where freshman Colin Brough was killed. Last week, it was officials at Umpqua Community College in rural Oregon who had to confront the heartbreak after a shooting spree left 10 dead, including the gunman, and nine injured.
The circumstances of the two shootings differ. The Arizona incident reportedly followed a confrontation between two student groups, while the Oregon shooter went on an unprovoked rampage. But both could happen only in an environment where it is all too easy to get a gun. No sooner had Cheng finished speaking Friday than another school, this time Texas Southern University in Houston,went on lockdown after two people were shot, one fatally, at a student housing facility near the campus.
According to Everytown for Gun Safety, there have been at least 149 school shootings since 2013, 52 this year alone. The mass shootings, such as at Umpqua last week or Sandy Hook in 2012 or Virginia Tech in 2007, get the most attention. But many of the incidents occur, as apparently happened in Flagstaff, when an altercation escalates and - instead of walking away or, at worst, throwing a punch - someone reaches for the all-too-accessible gun.
On Oct. 3, 2014, it was at Langston Hughes High School in Georgia, where an 18-year-old student allegedly traded insults with a 17-year-old from a different school and shot and killed him. On April 16, 2013, it was at Stillman College in Alabama, where an argument about a bet over a video game resulted in one student being shot twice and the other charged with attempted murder. On Jan. 16, 2013, it was the turn of Chicago State University in Illinois, where a fight broke out at a basketball game, spilled into the parking lot and ended with a 17-year-old fatally shot.
This week we wrote about an 8-year-old girl shot dead allegedly by her 11-year-old neighbor after she wouldn't let him see her puppy. We observed how in other countries without as many guns, fights between children don't end in such tragedies. The same applies to students who argue over bets or basketball games or school rivalries or whatever silly thing sparked Friday's early morning confrontation in Flagstaff. We're all for better mental-health treatment, peer counseling and programs to discourage the misuse of alcohol. But the most obvious way to reduce gun violence is not to have so many guns so readily available when people fight, drink and get angry.
