A sixth grader was killed, and another four students injured, in a mass shooting at Perry High School in Iowa Thursday.
The shooter, a 17-year-old armed with a pump-action shotgun and a small-caliber handgun, was found dead from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound at the scene. The shooter also had an “improvised explosive device” that was neutralized by authorities.
Though police indicated that the shooter had made social media posts before and around the time of the shooting, further details about their motive were not immediately known. The identity of the student who was killed has not been released. Those injured are expected to survive.
The shooting comes after a near-record number of mass shootings in 2023. No other high-income country has suffered such a high death toll from gun violence. Every day, 120 Americans die at the end of a gun, including suicides and homicides, an average of 43,375 per year. According to the latest available analysis of data from 2015 to 2019, the US gun homicide rate was 26 times that of other high-income countries; its gun suicide rate was nearly 12 times higher. Mass shootings, defined as attacks in which at least four people are injured or killed excluding the shooter, have been on the rise since 2015, peaking at 686 incidents in 2021.
Despite that sheer carnage, however, the political debate over how to ensure that guns don’t fall into the hands of people who may hurt themselves and others has long proved intractable. In 2022, Congress reached a deal on limited gun reforms for the first time in nearly 30 years in the wake of a shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas — the deadliest school shooting since 2012.
But those narrow reforms clearly haven’t stopped America’s gun violence epidemic. The US’s expansive view of civilian gun ownership has been so ingrained in politics, in culture, and in the law since the nation’s founding that there’s no telling how many more people will die…
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