Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/tag/gun-violence-prevention/)
The 9-year-old had been drawing images of guns at school and pretending to point the weapons at other students. He’d become more withdrawn, and had stared angrily at a teacher. The principal suspended him for a week. Educators were unsure whether it was safe for him to return to school — and, if so, how best to support him.
Their nightmare started with a note the coroner left on the front door of their home while Sharmaine Brown and her husband, James, were away from home: “Call the medical examiner’s office regarding the following case number … ” Over a $30 dispute that didn’t involve him, their 23-year-old son had been killed when a gunman sprayed bullets at a weekend cookout.
The murders would not have happened if the parents hadn't purchased a gun for Ethan Crumbley or if they had taken him home from Oxford High School on the day of the shooting, when staff became alarmed about his extreme drawings, the appeals court said, in a groundbreaking case of criminal responsibility for the acts of a child.
A 17-year-old student was found dead in the Colorado woods after being accused of shooting and wounding two administrators at his Denver high school where students and parents were already fed up over recent violence and a lack of action by officials, authorities.
Will Keeps was a 15-year-old member of a Chicago gang when he witnessed rival members kill his friend. He escaped the streets and moved to Iowa to help other young people from troubled backgrounds. Now, Keeps is hospitalized and in serious condition following just the sort of violence he has devoted his life to stopping: a shooting that killed two teenagers at the Starts Right Here education program he founded in Des Moines.
Most gun incidents in and around campuses are more like Oak Park than Uvalde. They're not planned large-scale shootings, or active-shooter situations. More often, they're smaller altercations that escalate when someone has a gun at or near a school, a game or other event, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database, which tracks incidents from the last five decades.
The backstories of Sakran and Pep couldn’t be more different. But their survivor stories drive their activism about the public health threat that gun violence poses and prove what some of the most alarming news headlines increasingly suggest: Almost anybody, almost anywhere, is a potential victim of gun violence.
Mayor LaToya Cantrell last year launched the Office of Gun Violence Prevention. That office funds and evaluates efforts to especially reduce gun violence among youth — 15- through 24-year-olds nationwide accounted for most of a prior decades’ surge in firearm-driven homicides — and has partnered in an effort largely lead by public health professionals who are tackling the problem as more than merely an issue of crime and punishment.
I began my research program on gun violence prevention in the early 1970s, when my children were just starting school. Now I am the proud grandfather of...
Story produced by the Chicago Bureau. President Barack Obama delivered his second inaugural address Monday, promising to focus on climate control and pursue greater equality for gay Americans. Those issues, however, are just the beginning of the challenges he must face as he starts his second term. Fixing a broken global economy still ranks first in the minds of many Americans, along with ending our conflicts abroad. On the domestic front there’s no getting around the debate over gun control, with both sides digging in for a fight in Congress – spurred on by a mounting body count that now includes a family in New Mexico, shot dead by a 15-year-old boy.