Monthly Wrap-up: Shootings at schools in January 2024
Review of incident details and recommendations from the "other school shootings" that rarely make national news. Plus a near miss, averted attack, and swatting arrest.
In January 2024, there were twenty-seven shootings at schools including the first planned mass casualty attack since the Covenant School in Nashville nine months ago. A school shooting was also narrowly averted as a student with a loaded rifle was stopped by police across the street from his school. Another teen was caught with guns, explosives, and a rocket propelled grenade launcher (RPG) the night before a planned attack.
On the first day back from winter break, a student opened fire with a shotgun and pistol inside Perry Middle and High School in Iowa. This school shooting was not an outlier, it followed the same patterns as planned attacks across the last six decades. If you missed it, here is my extended interview with Iowa Public Radio about it.
Following Uvalde, politicians in Iowa reallocated $75 million in COVID relief funding to school security. After 18-months, only 43 schools across the entire state have received less than $1 million total of this funding. The Perry School District’s application was on hold pending an assessment of the campus for more than a year before eight people were shot. An investigation by the Associated Press found that Tetra Tech—the contractor running Iowa’s school security grant program—has been paid $5.2 million, more than 5x the amount of money that has gone to the schools.
While the attack in Perry was covered by national media, many of the other shootings at schools were barely mentioned. Each one of these twenty-seven incidents offers unique insights for improving school safety and preventing gun violence.
Here is a summary of each shooting at a school in January with the trends and recommendations. As a bonus for subscribers, there is also a summary of an averted shooting (plot stopped by tips from students), a near miss (attacker stopped by police on his way to campus), a complicated verbal threat to deal with, and a major swatting arrest.
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