Citizens are demanding answers about how many school shootings there have been in 2023 and the recent number of incidents year by year in the USA.
WARNING: Content of a disturbing nature ahead
The USA has been shaken this week by the news of a tragic school shooting that occurred in Nashville, Tennessee, on Monday, March 27.
At the time of writing, three children under the age of nine have been confirmed dead, along with a further three members of staff at Covenant preschool.
The incident was not the first of its kind in 2023, and serves as another stark reminder of just how many similar school shootings happen in the USA year by year.
How many school shootings have there been in the USA in 2023?
According to research by the K-12 School Shooting Database, a public database that has documented gun violence on education campuses since 2018, there has been 89 school shooting incidents in the USA so far in 2023.
It should be noted though that it is unclear whether or not this figure includes the Nashville incident, given how recently it occurred.
Those numbers are part of a wider figure of mass shootings incidents in the USA that have occurred outside of schools, a statistic that also makes for rather grim reading.
A mass shooting is defined as an incident wherein at least four people are shot and injured or killed, not including the person who fired the gun. According to reports, there have been 130 mass shootings in the USA thus far in 2023, which works out at just shy of 1.5 mass shootings per day.
Number of school shootings is increasing by the year
While it is too early to tell what the figure will come to by the end of 2023, the number of school shootings has been increasing year by year as of late in the USA.
Last year, 2022, saw the highest number of school shooting incidents in the USA since records began in 1970, with a staggering figure of 303 separate shootings.
Read Related Also: Sunshine Protection Act might means the US might not 'spring forwards' anymore
To put that into perspective, that’s 53 more incidents than the year before and over six times more than there were in 2016. And, remarkably, if the current trend continues, that figure looks set to be eclipsed in 2023.
Addressing the Nashville shooting, President Joe Biden called on Congress to back a ban on assault weapons, as he condemned the “sick” attack.
Shocking stats reveal scale of gun violence since Columbine
Unfortunately, there is no relief from the bleak statistics, as The Washington Post has uncovered even more unnerving numbers regarding school shootings.
The Post noted that the federal government does not keep an official record of school shooting incidents, so they have attempted to track how many children had been affected since the Columbine shooting that took 15 lives in 1999.
And according to their findings, no less than 348,000 children have experienced gun violence at school in the USA in the last 24 years, meaning they were at school at the time of a shooting incident.
The Nashville shooting came just five days after the last school shooting incident in the USA, in which two adults were injured in Denver, Colorado, after a pupil fired a gun during a weapons check.
In other news, How many employees does Disney have in 2023 as CEO prepares to cut 7000 jobs?
!function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s)
{if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function(){n.callMethod?
n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments)};
if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n;n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version=’2.0′;
n.queue=[];t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0;
t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0];
s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)}(window, document,script’,
‘
fbq(‘init’, ‘677672980820926’);
fbq(‘track’, ‘PageView’);
