This year has been by far the worst on record for gun violence in US schools, the advocacy group Sandy Hook Promise said, citing research by the US Naval Postgraduate School (NPS).
The NPS Center for Homeland Defense and Security counted 94 school shooting incidents this year in the US, a nearly 60 percent increase on the previous high, 59, an unwanted record set in 2006.
The NPS database goes back to 1970 and documents any instance in which a gun is “brandished, is fired, or a bullet hits school property for any reason,” regardless of the number of victims or the day of the week.
Photo: AP
This Year, high-profile attacks in Parkland, Florida, and Santa Fe, Texas, have intensified a national conversation about gun violence in schools.
Seventeen students and staff members were killed in Parkland. Ten students and teachers died in Santa Fe.
“This is beyond unacceptable,” said Nicole Hockley, cofounder and managing director of Sandy Hook Promise (SHP). “It is inexcusable. Everyone has the power to stop violence before it starts and we want to arm as many people as possible with the knowledge of how to keep their schools and communities safe.”
Hockley’s six-year-old son, Dylan, was shot dead at Sandy Hook elementary school in Connecticut in December 2012, with 19 other children and six adult members of staff.
In response to the NPS findings and to mark the sixth anniversary of the Sandy Hook shooting on Friday, Sandy Hook Promise is to release a jarring public service announcement.
The short film “reveals the many warning signs and signals exhibited by an at-risk individual that can lead to gun violence — signs that SHP wants to train individuals to recognize and intervene upon before a tragedy can occur,” the group said
The video, made by director Rupert Sanders and Oscar-winning cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, among others, shows a series of interactions between high-school students from a first-person perspective. Near the end, a student appears to retrieve an assault rifle from a bag.
“While the scene is set with excited students in the hallways, there is another story unfolding simultaneously: a shooter planning to attack the school and exhibiting the warning signs of impending violence,” the group said in a statement.
“These signs happen amongst peers and educators who could have identified these signs and intervened before it was too late. An astonishing 80 percent of school shooters told someone of their plans prior to taking action — yet no interventions were made,” it said.
The spot is an extension of the Know the Signs program, which Sandy Hook Promise said has been used to train more than 5.5 million people from more than 10,000 schools in all 50 US states.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion