US School Shootings on the Rise After Pandemic-Caused Hiatus

On Tuesday, yet another school shooting rattled Oxford, Michigan, resulting in three deaths and eight injuries. The attacker was a 15-year-old student armed with a handgun.

The United States has seen a surge in school shootings following a brief break in 2020 caused by the coronavirus pandemic, as remote teaching took hold.

According to Education Week, there were at least 28 school shootings with casualties in the US in 2021. Twenty have been reported since August, with the most recent one taking place in Oxford, Michigan on 30 November.

When it comes to the general number of gunfire incidents on school grounds, gun-control advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety estimates 138 episodes happened in 2021. In total, the incidents resulted in 28 deaths and 80 injuries, with one more month of the year to go.

"When it comes to how American children are exposed to gun violence, gunfire at schools is just the tip of the iceberg – every year, more than 3,000 children and teens are shot and killed and 15,000 more are shot and injured," the group noted. "An estimated 3 million children in the US are exposed to shootings per year."

The 2020 figures, apparently impacted by the coronavirus pandemic plunging schools into home learning, showed a dramatically lower number – 10 school shootings, with 2018 and 2019 both recording 24 shootings.

Education Week notes in its report that the lower numbers in 2020 do not necessarily indicate that the schools were safer, rather illustrating how the definition of school safety has shifted due to COVID restrictions.

Tuesday's Michigan shooting resulted in more deaths than any of the school shootings since the 2018 Texas incident at Santa Fe High School, when ten people were killed.

In Oxford, a 15-year-old student armed with a handgun allegedly owned by his father shot several people, killing three and injuring eight. He was apprehended by local police – no shots were fired during his arrest.

In recent years, the number of incidents of gun violence in US schools has been growing. Despite showing a brief decline when it came to schools, the pandemic-caused "hiatus" of 2020 still resulted in an increased number of other types of shootings. The Gun Violence Archive, defining a mass shooting as an incident with at least four people killed (except the perpetrator), recorded 611 mass shootings in 2020. In 2019, this number was 417.