Dead again: Another school shooting from America’s plague of easy-to-get guns

Daily News Editorial Board, New York Daily News
·2 min read
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Another school shooting has left children and adults dead, this time in Nashville. Shake your head and move on to the next headline, for this is America, where the routine nature of gun violence, including in places that are supposed to be havens for the young and vulnerable, has us trapped in an excruciating perpetual loop.

Monday at the Covenant School, a Christian academy serving preschoolers through sixth graders, a 28-year-old wielding two high-powered rifles and a handgun shot dead three children and three staff members. It is a curiosity in this case that the gunman was a gunwoman. Ninety-eight percent of mass shootings are perpetrated by males.

But it’s not the least bit surprising that this happened in a nation where guns are incredibly easy to come by, and in a state where one can carry just about any type of gun just about anywhere. Since 2018, American schoolchildren have suffered 157 shootings on school grounds that resulted in injuries or deaths. So far this year, the grim count is 13.

Every outburst of gunfire in a place where children are supposed to be nurtured and educated produces ripples of pain far beyond those wounded and murdered. The Washington Post estimates that nearly 300,000 students have experienced school gun violence since the Columbine massacre in 1999.

The nation will learn more about what motivated this killer — whether ideology or madness or anger or, likelier, some combination of the three. It will learn more about the actions of the police and other protectors; at first blush, they performed admirably. To adapt Leo Tolstoy’s observation on happy and unhappy families, every tragic incident is tragic in its own way.

But what links all tragic incidents here — the school shootings; the 129 mass shootings so far this year in the United States; the 40,000-plus gun deaths, mostly homicides and suicides, that are a deadly daily drumbeat — is ready access to firearms and ammunition and a culture that celebrates violence. Until those two overpowering variables change, nothing else will.