After Nearly 20 Years, a School Shooting First

This has been the first March since 2002 there hasn't been a US school shooting
By Jenn Gidman,  Newser Staff
Posted Apr 15, 2020 12:28 PM CDT
After Nearly 20 Years, a School Shooting First
Stock photo.   (Getty Images/smolaw11)

Starting in March, schools across America began shuttering amid the coronavirus pandemic. With kids from kindergarten through college now holed up at home, a Washington Post reporter made a startling observation: "Last month was the first March without a school shooting in the United States since 2002," Robert Klemko noted on Twitter Monday in a tweet since shared nearly 170,000 times. That would mean that current high school seniors were just infants, or not even born, the last time US schools didn't see a shooting in the third month of the year, notes CBS News, which cites data from National School Safety and Security Services and the National School Safety Center as confirmation.

However, the Hill reports it's not clear what Klemko considers to be a school shooting, as he also cites stats from the gun safety advocacy site Everytown, and Everytown does list seven gunfire incidents at schools in March 2020, including a deadly shooting involving adults on a Texas high school football field on a Sunday and four unintentional discharges. As for March 2002, we "came damn close" to it not being a shooting-free month, Klemko tweeted: A 13-year-old in Carmichael, Calif., brought a gun and hit list to school on March 20 of that year, but a school resource officer deputy stopped him before any shooting could be carried out. (More school shooting stories.)

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