School shootings draw graduate’s attention; lawmakers must act

It wasn't a cheerful graduation statement, but it's hard to dispute the sincerity behind Gina Warren's grad-cap statement against gun violence or her standing to have an opinion on the matter.

She and fellow members of the Class of 2019 have grown up with more senseless school shootings than any class before; it's understandable that she wants that trend to end.

Warren, whose commencement from Teays Valley High School was Sunday, drew viral online acclaim after tweeting a photo and explaining her mortarboard decoration: a QR code connecting to a website listing 50 teens who have been shot to death at their schools, going back to and including the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo.

Atop the list of lives lost, Warren wrote: "I graduated. These high school students couldn't."

It seems a heartfelt statement of the personal connection many high-schoolers feel to the uniquely American tragedy of random gun violence. Warren said she was inspired by the activist response of many of the students who survived the February 2018 attack at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., where a 19-year-old former student who had been expelled is accused of goingto the school andkilling 17.

Several Douglas students became nationally known as advocates for gun control and youth activism; their movement inspired "March for Our Lives" demonstrations across the country and is credited in part with substantially increasing young voter turnout in the 2018 election.

Who can blame an American high-schooler for feeling that gun violence is a national crisis?

Schools aren’t the only settings for mass gun violence, of course. Americans have been

equally horrified by scenes of slaughter at churches, cinemas, concerts and workplaces. And preventing such tragedies, in a society in which so many people have guns, has proven difficult.

While many of the policies advocated by the March For Our Lives group — universal background checks, red-flag laws and laws targeting gun trafficking — are reasonable and sensible, critics are correct when they say such measures won’t prevent the next mass shooting by a disturbed individual.

One approach, though, almost certainly would save lives: requiring those who have guns to store them safely. A study published Monday in the journal JAMA Pediatrics found that, of the 14,000 American children killed by guns in the past decade, more than a third committed suicide. Another 6% were shot accidentally.

How many of those young people might still be alive if they hadn’t been able to get their hands on a gun?

This should be an easy thing for policymakers to agree on. In fact, groups that typically oppose each other on gun issues already have agreed: In 2017, the Ohio chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics joined with the Columbus Division of Police and gun-rights groups including the Buckeye Firearms Association on the “Store it Safe” campaign.

An earlier study, reported in JAMA in 2010, showed that more than 80% of children who committed suicide with a firearm did so with a gun belonging to a parent or other relative.

The plea of Warren and others — simply to make the mass shootings stop — doesn’t have an easy answer. But while thornier issues are debated in Ohio and elsewhere, lawmakers should seize the chance to prevent tragedies by requiring adults to make their guns off-limits to children.