SHOOTINGS

dents every day sometimes fail to prevent gun violence from spilling onto their campuses.

In targeted shootings, gang members or estranged husbands attack students and educators on campuses simply as a matter of convenience - the perpetrators know where their intended victims will be and when.

A year ago, in San Bernardino, Calif., a man who had long harassed his estranged wife walked into her classroom and, without a word, fired 10 shots from his revolver, killing her and also fatally wounding an 8-yearold. He then took his own life.

In 2016, just as hundreds of students were letting out for the day from Lindenmckinley STEM Academy in Columbus, Ohio, a 16year-old in a passing car opened fire and wounded two students — one 12, the other 15 — on the front lawn.

Cases such as that one, which was gang related and didn’t kill anybody, seldom prompt demands for reform. The same is true of accidental shootings that cause injuries (at least 16 since Columbine) and suicides committed in a public space or that included a threat to other students (at least four have occurred over the same period).

The emotional damage children suffer from these shootings, however, can be just as crippling as what others endure during highly publicized assaults.

A study published in the journal Pediatrics in 2015 concluded that kids who witness an attack involving a gun or knife can be just as traumatized as children who have been shot or stabbed.

“In some ways, the distress caused, especially when the victim is a child or other close family member, might even be worse,” said Sherry Hamby, a clinical psychologist and co-author of the study.

“We don’t do enough to acknowledge the collateral damage of gun violence. We are asking too many to carry this burden.”

More than 700 students attended Linden-mckinley two years ago, and scores of them saw the carnage that unfolded during that driveby.

“All I heard is these gunshots go off,” Ya’mya Wilson, a junior, told a TV station at the time. “I literally started crying.” •••

The news was both infuriating and encouraging for Duke Bradley, principal at Benjamin Banneker High, an almost all-black school south of downtown Atlanta. A girl had spotted a classmate with a gun and reported it to an administrator.

Weapons of any kind are banned at Banneker, where in 2014, before Bradley arrived, someone had opened fire in the parking lot, injuring no one but forcing classes into lockdown.

Still, the fact that the girl had come forward last year, the principal said, told him that she wanted to learn in a place free from the violence plaguing her community.

After the gun was confiscated, Bradley confronted the boy, who was about 15. He asked whether he’d brought the pistol to shoot someone there.

“Of course not,” the teen told him, offended that Bradley would think that.

The boy had brought it, he explained, because he needed protection on his way to and from campus.

“It was sobering,” Bradley said.

“We, as adults — sometimes even the ones that work in these schools - are insulated from the world that our kids come from.”

In November, another teen brought a gun simply because he had found it on the way. He, too, said he had no intention to hurt anyone, but it went off in a classroom, injuring two of Bradley’s students — and making Banneker one of at least four schools that have experienced two shootings since Columbine.

The Post analysis found that 62.6 percent of the students exposed to gun violence at school since 1999 were children of color, and almost all those shootings were targeted or accidental, rather than indiscriminate.

These incidents rarely make the news.

In part, that’s because far fewer people are injured, but it’s also, experts say, because of the outside world’s perception of kids who grow up in high-crime neighborhoods.

“Often, we have this notion that, ‘Oh, they’re used to it’ - and that’s BS,” said Steven Berkowitz, director of the Penn Center for Youth and Family Trauma Response and Recovery. “They’re not used to it.”

Berkowitz has for two decades treated inner-city children who encounter gunfire in their neighborhoods as well as in their schools.

The threat of violence in parts of Philadelphia, where he works now, is so relentless that some students keep their backs to the walls at all times — and often can’t explain why.

Many of those children are in states of hyper-vigilance, he said, and tend to perceive danger even where there is none, much like combat veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder.

“I think these mass school shootings are absolutely horrific,” he said, but “it’s much more insidious and potentially really life altering to have this ongoing danger . . . . It’s not different than kids living in chronic war zones.”

Earlier this month, in Birmingham, Ala., 150 miles west of Banneker High, another gun discharged at another school attended almost entirely by black children. Police, at least initially, suspected it was an accident.

It happened in a classroom, just as students were leaving for the day. The round pierced the heart of Courtlin Arrington, who died one month shy of her 18th birthday. She was a senior, headed for college. She wanted to become a nurse.

The same week, Javon Davies, a sixth-grader at a Birmingham middle school, came home and told his mom, Mariama, that he and his classmates had spent the day in lockdown.

“Somebody said they was going to shoot up the school,” she recalled him saying.

Javon, who is 12, had heard about Courtlin’s killing, just as he had heard about Parkland.

He and a friend suspected that they, too, might die at their school, so each of the boys wrote a will.

“Mom,” the other sixthgrader wrote in print letters, “I want to give my friend Javon every thing that I own that includes the xbox and games and controllers and all that comes with it.”

In Javon’s instructions, he listed his Playstation 4, his Xbox 360 and his dirt bike.

“I love you my whole Family you mean the most to me,” he wrote.

“You gave me the clothes on my back, you fed me, and you were always by my side.”