Senseless

VIEWPOINT

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor

Some end-of-the-year data came out today that showed there were 39 school shootings in 2024 (for clarity, a “school shooting” was defined as a gun-related incident in which at least one person was killed). That’s more than three per month (actually, it’s more frequent than that when you consider that most schools are closed all or at least part of the summer months.

The good news is that, at least, that was down from 42 such violent incidents in 2023 and from the 53 that occurred in 2022 (which is basically one a week, which is just terrible).

The first mass school shooting in 2024 took place just four days into the calendar year, when a 6th grade student died, four more students were injured, and three staff members were injured in a shooting at Perry High School in Iowa. One of the injured staff members, the school’s principal, died 10 days later

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from injuries he sustained during the incident.

Exactly eight months later, two students and two teachers were shot and killed by a 14year-old student at Apalachee High School in Georgia. The incident had more casualties than any other school shooting in 2024—in addition to the four deaths, nine people were injured.

Two of the four mass shootings in schools this year took place in Georgia. Separate from the Apalachee incident, four students were shot and injured on Feb. 14 at Benjamin E. Mays High School in Atlanta.

The year’s last mass shooting took place just nine days before Christmas, on Dec. 16, at the Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wis. One teacher and a 14-year-old student were killed, and six other people were injured.

Dozens of people were shot on school grounds this year Nationwide, 18 people died and 59 others were injured this year in instances of gun violence in and around schools.

The number of deaths is lower than in the previous two years, but more than double the tally in 2019, when eight people died in school shootings nationwide. That number is lower than in any other year since tracking such things was deemed relevant and we began tracking school shootings — aside from 2020, when school buildings nationwide were closed for much of the year.

The total number of casualties— injuries and deaths combined— is higher than in 2023, but significantly lower than in 2022, when 140 people were injured or killed in a school shooting, according to the tracking data.

And if you saw the year-in-review we did for the local news earlier this week, you know that our local schools spent a lot of time this year dealing with threats of violence on our own school campuses. Thankfully, none of those threats ultimately came to fruition, but the possibility, unfortunately, it always one to keep in mind.

Senseless. Plain and simple.

Of course, you’ve probably seen the news that serves as a reminder that these kinds of senseless acts are not limited to school campuses. On New Year’s Eve, a deranged individual drove his ickup truck into a crowd gathered to usher in the new year on Bourbon Street in New Orleans. Then the gunfire started. By the time is was over, 15 people were dead, including the driver of the truck, asn dozens of others were injured.

All we really know about the perpetrator is that he was “inspired by ISIS,” the Muslim extremist terrorist group, to carry out his act of violence. I guess we won’t really ever get a better explanation, if there is even one to give.

Again, just senseless…

Clearly there are problems in our country — with gun violence, with mental health, with a lot of things, really.

A little after midnight, I texted my reporter, Don, a Happy New Year’s message.

A few minutes later, he sent me an audio message, which isn’t all that unusual. He does that sometimes instead of calling or texting, but this audio clip didn’t have any words. It was a weird series of pops, rattling off at irregular intervals… pop-pop, pop, pop-poppop-pop, pop, pop-pop… maybe a minute of that. At first, I thought it might be fireworks, but no. Some of the good people of West Memphis has decided to celebrate the new year by firing their guns into the air.

Not anything new — it’s been happening for years — but still pretty reckless and stupid. In fact, in 2021, a grandmother was killed in West Memphis on the 4th of July by a falling bullet in front of her family.

Utterly, uterly senseless.