The unseen casualties
In the past two decades, more than 187,000 American students have experienced a shooting during school hours, said journalists John Woodrow Cox and Steven Rich. The resulting fear and survivor’s guilt can linger for years.
T HIRTEEN AT Columbine. Twenty-six at Sandy Hook. Seventeen at Marjory Stoneman Douglas. Over the past two decades, a handful of massacres that have come to define U.S. school shootings are almost always remembered for the students and educators slain. Death tolls are repeated so often that the numbers and places become permanently linked. What those figures fail to capture, though, is the collateral damage of this uniquely American crisis. Beginning with Columbine in 1999, more than 187,000 students attending at least 193 primary or secondary schools have experienced a shooting on campus during school hours, according to a yearlong Washington Post analysis. Many are never the same. Every day, threats send classrooms into lockdowns that can frighten students, even when they turn out to be false alarms. Thousands of schools conduct activeshooter drills in which kids as young as 4 hide in darkened closets and bathrooms from imaginary murderers. “It’s no longer the default that going to school is going to make you feel safe,” said Bruce D. Perry, a psychiatrist and one of the country’s leading experts on childhood trauma. “Even kids who come from middleclass and upper-middle-class communities literally don’t feel safe in schools.” Samantha Haviland understands the waves of fear created by the attacks as well as anyone. At 16, she survived the carnage at Columbine High, a seminal moment in the evolution of modern school shootings. Now 35, she is the director of counseling for Denver’s public school system and has spent almost her entire professional life treating traumatized kids. Yet she’s never fully escaped the effects of what happened to her on that morning in Littleton, Colo. The nightmares, always of being chased, lingered for years. Even now, the image of children walking out of schools with their hands up is too much for her to bear. Teens today “were born and raised in a on that morning in 2008, Corneilous Cheers, 17, opened fire, striking his schoolmate in the leg, the groin, and the head. As his rival bled on the floor, Cheers turned to their gym teacher at Mitchell High and handed him the gun. “It’s over now,” the teen said. The term “school shooting” most often conjures a black-clad gunman roaming the hallways, firing at anyone he sees, but those attacks are considerably less common than the ones aimed at specific victims. Cheers, for example, society where mass shootings are a thing,” shot the other teen after a feud that had she said, recalling how much her community peaked, investigators said, in an off-campus and schoolmates blamed themselves for the confrontation days earlier. Although determining inexplicable attack by Eric Harris and Dylan motive is not always possible, the Klebold. “These students are saying, ‘No, Post found that targeted shootings were no—these things are happening because you about three times as common as those that all can’t figure it out.’ They’re angry, and I appeared indiscriminate. think that anger is appropriate.” This underscores just how difficult it is for Mass shootings at predominantly white schools to stop most shooters, particularly schools draw the most attention from journalists in a country with more than 250 million and lawmakers, but The Post has guns. The majority intend to harm just one found that children of color are far more or two people, so the attacks typically end likely to experience campus gun violence— within seconds, leaving little or no time nearly twice as much for Hispanic students for staff to intervene. In targeted shootings, and three times as much for black students. gang members or estranged husbands
attack students and educators on campuses In total, the Post found an average of 10 simply as a matter of convenience—the perpetrators school shootings per year since Columbine, know where their intended victims with a low of five in 2002 and a high of 15 will be and when. in 2014. Less than three months into 2018, there have been 11 shootings, already making A year ago, in San Bernardino, Calif., a this year among the worst on record. man who had long harassed his estranged Overall, at least 130 kids, teachers, and wife walked into her classroom and, without family members have been killed in assaults a word, fired 10 shots from his revolver, during school hours, and another 254 have killing her and also fatally wounding an been injured. Schools in at least 36 states 8-year-old. He then took his own life. and the District of Columbia have experienced The emotional damage children suffer from a shooting. They happened in big these shootings can be just as crippling as cities and small towns, in affluent suburbs what others endure during highly publicized and rural communities. What all of them assaults. A study published in the journal had in common was the profound damage Pediatrics in 2015 concluded that kids who they left behind. witness an attack involving a gun or knife T HE DAY HAD just begun at a high can be just as traumatized as children who school in Memphis when a sophomore have been shot or stabbed.
W walked up to a senior during HEN ED MCCLANAHAN first saw the gym class and pointed a .22-caliber pistol teenager holding a .357 Magnum at him. In a room packed with 75 students revolver in the middle of North