Gun laws pertaining to schools prevent people from saving more lives and stopping shootings in the making. The Virginia Tech shooting in 2007 goes down in history as the worst school shooting in U.S history. Seung-Hui killed “32 unarmed students on the campus of Virginia Tech” (McGrath), taking his time to go through the building as he “had no expectation that a fellow student or a faculty member might shoot back”(McGrath) thanks to Virginia Tech’s gun-free zone. If Virginia Tech hadn’t had that law, people like Tracy Bridges would have had their guns on them, saving some students that could be alive today “instead of having to sprint to their cars in distant parking lots.” (McGrath).The same happened in1997 when Luke Woodham, then 16, used and action rifle to kill two students and wound seven others at his high school in Pear, Mississippi. Joel Myrick heard the shots and sprinted to get his .45 that was “Prohibited by law” (McGrath) onto campus.
Like I said, guns can’t choose its targets. The power behind the gun is that it has the capability to kill. There were innocent people who are killed by guns every year in the United States, and some of gun shooting events occurred on campus. At 11:21 A.M. on April 20, 1999, 18-year-old Eric Harris and 17-year-old Dylan Klebold entered Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, from back parking lot carrying two shotguns, a Hi-Point semiautomatic rifle and a 9 millimeter Tech DC 9 semi-automatic pistol with a high-capacity magazine. They shot to death 12 students and a teacher, and then they killed themselves (Lamb).
15 years have passed since the infamous “Columbine High School Massacre” of 1999, where two secluded high school seniors murdered 12 students and 1 high school teacher. This tragic event , and the death of 30 000 other people due to gun violence each year, sparked a large debate over gun control laws in the US which still exists to this day and seems unlikely to simmer-down any time soon. In In the critically acclaimed documentary “Bowling For Columbine”, Michael Moore explores the roots of Americans fascination of guns. This documentary can easily be viewed as fully objective as Moore does not choose sides between gun control or civil rights, but instead tackles what is the cause of such fondness of this awful culture. This documentary heavily revolves around the idea that the main cause of gun violence in America is due to so many American’s being immersed in a culture of fear.
Columbine high school massacre. The Columbine High School massacre (often known simply as Columbine) was a school shooting which occurred on April 20, 1999, at Columbine High School in Columbine, an unincorporated area of Jefferson County, Colorado, United States. Two senior students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, embarked on a shooting spree in which a total of 12 students and 1 teacher were murdered. They also injured 21 other students directly, with three further people being injured while attempting to escape the school. The pair then committed suicide.
Should Teachers Carry Guns To School? Imagine the idea of being defenseless against an individual possessing the intention of wreaking mass destruction on the students and staff inside of a school. In 1999, Columbine High School, in Littleton Colorado, experienced a tragedy that holds historic importance to the concept of protecting those inside of a school in a worst case scenario. When thirteen students had their life taken away during a school shooting, the idea of allowing teachers to carry handguns during class received more attention than ever. The safety of the students at school may be at risk, such as the school shootings that occurred at Columbine High School.
Today there is not a more hotly debated issue than gun control. The most recent school shooting event has prompted an “I am mad as hell and I am not going to take it any more” moment just like it did in Sydney Lumet’s 1976 movie, Network. How many more school shootings do there need to be before the government stops talking about it and steps up and does something about it? It all seems to have started on April 20, 1999, when two high school students who were armed with weapons and bombs entered Columbine High School and killed twelve of their fellow classmates, one teacher and injured many more. On December 14, 2012, a lone gunman killed twenty first graders and six school teachers and administrators with an assault style rifle at the Sandy Hook Elementary School just outside of Newtown, Connecticut (Jonson).
It took only ten minutes for Nikolas Cruz to enter the school premises, fire dozens of rounds throughout the school, and kill seventeen students and teachers. Many of the results of other shootings occurred here as well, but the perpetrator did not kill himself at the end; rather, he left campus in accordance of the students who fled the school. Though, the police forces caught him soon after. The feeling of dread that the students felt as their peers and teachers fell, before them, downed by the malicious intents of an alumnus cannot and could not be tolerated. Those within the building suffered through the dread of death, but their families had to endure the fear of their loved one falling to those bullets.
Agnew’s General Strain Theory According to Chagrin Valley Times (2012), on Monday, February 27, seventeen year old T.J. Lane walked into the cafeteria of Chardon High School and shot ten people with a .22 caliber handgun. Three of those people were killed, another had minor injuries, and the last student remains in critical condition. Sixteen year old Russell King Jr. and Demetrius Hewlin, and sixteen year old Daniel Parmerto, were the unfortunate students who died that day. Lane was chased by a teacher as he fled the scene. Later, Lane surrendered to the police.
Shootings in American Schools Introduction In April 1999, two students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold attacked and killed 12 of their Columbine High school classmates. Since that eventful occasion that shocked the world, cases of school shootings have happened with higher regularity. Since 2000 for instance, there have been over 50 critical school shootings in the U. S as observed by (Hawdon, Oksanen, Rasanen & He, 2012). The office of the Governor (2007) noted that to put the problem of targeted school-based strikes into perspective, from 1993 to 1997, the possibilities that a child between the ages of 9-12 would be confronted or injured with a tool in class were 7 to 8 %.
These kinds of events were not supposed to happen at a simple high school in Colorado. They especially were not supposed to happen at Columbine. The events just described occurred on April 20th, 1999 at Columbine High School. Two high school students possessing illegally obtained guns barged into the high school and opened fire, killing fifteen people including themselves and injuring twenty-four others (Carter, Gun Control: Overview). Up to that point, this was the most significant school shooting massacre in American history.