A disaffected 14-year-old unleashed hell at his high school at Apalachee High School on Wednesday, shooting and killing two students and two teachers and leaving at least nine others hospitalized in the community that’s about a 50-mile drive northeast of Atlanta. The suspect, Colt Gray, was quickly taken into custody. His motives were not immediately known, although law enforcement authorities were already aware of him. The teen had been investigated a year earlier for allegedly threatening school violence. If readers find still-emerging details familiar, it’s likely because school shootings have become commonplace in the United States in recent years. From Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012 to Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, in 2022, the exact circumstances may vary. But the plot line is sadly predictable: A suspect showing signs of mental illness who has easy access to powerful weapons combined with a failure of those in authority to intervene and an inadequate public safety response.
Alas, school shootings are merely a subset of mass shootings, which are, in turn, just one component of gun violence. But what’s especially frustrating about such incidents — and there have been at least 133 shootings on school grounds so far this year across the U.S., according to Everytown for Gun Safety — is the nation’s continuing failure to take reasonable precautions against such an obvious menace to public safety.
Gun violence is not a problem for Democratic cities alone, although you wouldn’t know it from former President Donald Trump’s frequent references to “hellhole cities.” Statistically, the highest rates of gun violence (the states with the highest rates of gun deaths per 100,000 population) are rural states like Mississippi, with an average of 29.6 gun deaths per 100,000 or Alabama at 25.5 compared to the national average of 14.2. Even Maryland, with its well-publicized problems in Baltimore, fares better with an overall rate of 13.6, which is slightly below the average. Why? At least in part because of state laws restricting gun possession, licensing, storage and so forth. Even Baltimore has seen improvements in gun violence as it continues its pace to record the fewest gun-involved deaths in a decade. Yet gun laws alone are an inadequate response to this crisis.
Keeping guns out of the hands of damaged young men (and, yes, shooters are most likely to be male) is merely a starting point. Recognizing gun violence as a public health crisis with a broad array of risk factors is essential. Those risk factors range from socioeconomic, including poverty, race, inadequate housing, and education, to a history of violent behavior and exposures to traumatic events or drug and alcohol abuse. Just as in medicine, the answer often lies in early intervention. What if, for example, the Georgia shooter had been provided adequate counseling services or placed in a more supportive school environment to make a fresh start long before he thought to pick up a gun? We can’t know for certain, but studies suggest — as so often happens with public health risks — that such preventive steps can be extremely helpful.
Does that make it sound like a solution is simple? It shouldn’t. We probably can’t cure those socioeconomic factors, for example. And intervention can be costly. What works best? Counseling? Safe storage laws? Red flag laws? There is still much work to be done to understand not just why gun violence rates in certain communities are high but how best to reduce them. But that’s not a reason to shy away from proven, affordable approaches like mandatory background checks for individuals looking to buy a gun. States like Maryland can pass such restrictions (assuming they pass muster with the U.S. Supreme Court majority’s often myopic views on the Second Amendment), but it does little good if guns are easily available in neighboring states like West Virginia.
In Georgia, officials quickly labeled the deadly episode “pure evil.” That’s an appropriate label. Here’s another: “purely unsurprising.” It’s long past time to get serious about preventing school shootings and not simply decrying them after the fact.
Baltimore Sun editorial writers offer opinions and analysis on news and issues relevant to readers. They operate separately from the newsroom.
