A grad student accused of shooting and killing a faculty member at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on August 28 has been arrested and charged with first-degree murder and possessing a gun on an education property.
The faculty member was the grad student’s adviser, Zijie Yan, an associate professor in the department of Applied Physical Sciences. It’s not yet clear what the shooter’s motivation may have been. Police are still searching for the weapon used in the attack and have not determined whether it was obtained legally.
It’s one of dozens of school shootings this year alone, and comes just after another high-profile shooting in Jacksonville, Florida, where the shooter appeared to first try to target Edward Waters University, a historically Black university, before opening fire at Black victims in a Dollar General store instead.
This kind of violence is unique to the US and should not be normalized.
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. There have been 476 mass shootings in the US in 2023 as of late August, and at the current pace, the US is set to eclipse the 2021 record this year.
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 — such as the UNC shooter — has long proved intractable. Last year, Congress reached a deal on limited gun reforms for the first time in nearly 30 years in the wake of a…
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