In the Wake of the Apalachee High School Shooting, States Including Iowa, Georgia, Florida, and Tennessee Have Seen Numerous School Shooting Threats and Guns On Campuses
As the nation reels from yet another deadly school shooting in Georgia, only one month into the school year, schools across the country are receiving an influx of gun threats on campus, particularly in states with weak gun laws. Some of these threats have involved confiscating firearms from students on campus. This is the grim reality of ‘guns everywhere’ culture: when state policy ensures the absence of gun safety laws, the consequences are deadly.
“We’re clearly experiencing a crisis despite there being such obvious methods of prevention, chief among them being that all gun owners simply secure their firearms in their homes and cars,” said Dr. Annie Andrews, a pediatrician and Senior Advisor at Everytown for Gun Safety. “An estimated 4.6 million American children live in homes where at least one firearm is kept loaded and unlocked. States can do a lot more to save lives and prevent trauma, from passing much-needed secure storage laws to educating gun owners about the serious risks and consequences of failing to securely store firearms. We cannot keep failing our children on this issue.”
“It should come as no surprise that the gun lobby’s extreme ‘guns everywhere’ agenda has indeed led to guns being everywhere, including in our kid’s schools,” said Nick Suplina, senior vice president for law and policy of Everytown for Gun Safety. “When lawmakers weaken our gun laws instead of passing basic, preventative measures like secure storage or extreme risk protection order laws, the harsh reality is that we will continue to see guns appear in our classrooms, and our children will pay the price.”
“After experiencing gun violence in my own school, my perception of ‘safety’ completely shattered and I know I’m not alone in that feeling either,” said Stella Kaye, a gun violence survivor and Students Demand Action National Organizing Board member. “Gun violence is staining the experiences of an entire generation of students in America. As a survivor and a young person tired of daily gun violence, I’m demanding our leaders take action on gun safety rather than worrying about which books to ban. It’s not the books that are killing us, it’s the guns.”
For example, Georgia, Iowa, and Tennessee – all states that have had threats of violence on campuses – are states that have rolled back gun violence prevention laws in the last decade, including by allowing permitless carry. Each of these states is all too familiar with the pain of horrific school shootings, having each experienced devastating incidents of gun violence on school grounds in the last several years. Instead of responding to these tragedies with action, elected lawmakers in these states continue to block life-saving gun safety legislation. Just this year, lawmakers in both Iowa and Tennessee, chose to respond to school shootings by passing laws to put more guns in schools by arming teachers.
Following the tragedy at Apalachee High School, other schools across Georgia, including Liberty County and Jeff Davis County, have reported school shooter threats made by students who attend schools in the districts.
In Iowa, several schools have received threats of guns on campuses. In the last week alone, at least four guns have been confiscated on school grounds, including a handgun found in the backpack of a student on Monday at Roosevelt High School in Des Moines. Other incidents of guns found on campus and lockdown situations in Iowa schools also included:
- Dubuque Elementary
- Davenport West High School
- Gowrie Southeast Valley Middle School
- Cedar Rapids High School
In Florida, a 14-year-old high school student threatened violence online targeting several schools across Broward County.
In Tennessee, police confiscated a loaded gun from a 6-year-old after he obtained his mother’s unsecured firearm and brought it to Geeter K-8 School. The loaded gun was passed around the classroom before being confiscated.
Just yesterday, a shooting at Northwest High School in Omaha, Nebraska left at least one 15-year-old boy shot and is in critical condition. Last week four guns were found at East Central High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
In recent years, these six states have not only failed to pass any gun safety legislation but have also worked to further weaken the state’s gun laws. All states have passed permitless carry despite 88% of Americans being in favor of policies requiring gun owners to obtain a permit before carrying a concealed weapon in public.
What Should Lawmakers Do to Prevent Guns In Schools?
Gun safety laws save lives. In order to prevent more incidents of violence on school grounds, lawmakers should pass gun safety legislation, including:
- Passing secure storage laws, to help ensure that children and teens cannot access guns and put themselves and others in danger.
- Enacting Extreme Risk Protection Order (ERPO) laws, which allows law enforcement officers, concerned family members, and other designated individuals to request that a court temporarily restricts a person’s access to firearms when they pose a serious risk of harm to self or others.
- Requiring background checks on all gun sales, which prevents minors and people prohibited from possessing firearms and from buying guns from gun shows, or from people offering guns for sale online with no questions asked.
- Raising the age to purchase semi-automatic rifles and handguns to 21, which can help prevent minors from obtaining assault weapons and many other semi-automatic guns.
- Prohibiting assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, which can prevent mass shooting injuries and deaths caused by high-powered semi-automatic rifles, and high-capacity magazines designed to allow shooters to kill many people quickly without having to reload.
- Repealing arming teachers laws, which puts the whole school at greater risk.
What Can Caregivers Do to Prevent Guns in Schools?
Every year, 350 children living in America under the age of 18 gain access to a firearm and unintentionally shoot themselves or someone else, like a sibling, parent, friend, or another person. The number one thing caregivers can do to prevent guns in schools is secure their firearms by keeping all guns unloaded, locked up, and stored separately from ammunition. Secure storage ensures that children and teens cannot access a gun and put themselves and others in danger.
Allowing more guns on campuses is not the solution. Georgia, Iowa, Florida, and Tennessee all allow for teachers and school personnel to be armed. More information about the dangers of guns in schools is available here.
The gun safety policies of a state affect the rate of gun violence. In states where elected officials have taken action to pass gun safety laws, fewer people die by gun violence — Georgia, for example, has some of the weakest gun laws in the nation and the 15th highest rate of gun deaths in the country. More about state gun law rankings is available here.