Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/tag/gun-violence-prevention/)
Just months after an unprecedented parental conviction in Michigan, Georgia prosecutors allege a father’s actions led to a mass school shooting. Colin Gray never pulled a trigger at Apalachee High School — where a mass shooting this week left two 14-year-old students and two math teachers dead — but he could still spend the rest of his life behind bars for murder.
Most school shootings don’t just happen out of nowhere – there are typically warning signs. This past September 4, a 14-year-old boy was arrested for allegedly opening fire in his Georgia high school math class – killing two teachers and two students. Only a year ago, authorities visited his home to investigate several anonymous tips about online threats to commit a school shooting. What went wrong in Georgia and how can we prevent this from happening in the future?
A new state law lets teachers carry a gun at school. James Arrowood, who’s had a handgun permit for 15 years, is open to doing so if it can provide an extra layer of security against a school shooting. But between concerns about his personal liability and ambivalence about the new law from local school leaders, many teachers won’t be carrying guns to class this school year.
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 He’d become more withdrawn, and had stared angrily at a teacher.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.