School Shootings Increased after Federal Gun Bans

Gun Watch ^ | 8 June, 2017 | Dean Weingarten

[marktwain]

High school shooting teams are increasing. They were common in the 40's, 50's, and 60's. Increasing government and media hostility to private gun ownership caused a huge decrease in the teams from 1968 through 2000. Now the numbers are growing. A Wisconsin representative is suggesting that Wisconsin develop a high school class on gun handling and gun safety.  A Wisconsin writer commented on the bill. From mediatrackers.org:

State Representative Ken Skowronski (R-Franklin) introduced a bill Thursday that would have the Department of Public Instruction develop a firearm course for Wisconsin High school students. In an era of gun-free school zones and zero tolerance policies that punish students for liking pictures of guns on Instagram, the notion of firearm training in schools likely will be anathema to many in the education establishment. But Skowronski says his “Firearm Education Bill” would address a need:

Later, the article reverses causality with this gem:

It was after school shootings became more frequent in the mid-1990’s that school officials decided their buildings were no place for guns.

It wasn't "school officials" that decided to ban guns in schools. It was federal legislators.  School shootings shot up after federal legislators passed the bans on guns in schools.

The first federal ban on guns in and around schools was the Gun Free School Zone Act of 1990. It was held to be unconstitutional in U.S. v. Lopez in 1995.  Janet Reno and Bill Clinton lobbied hard for superficial changes to the bill, and passed it again, in 1996.  It has not had a serious challenge in court since then. The second federal ban on guns was the Gun Free School Act of 1994. It made federal funding dependent on school gun bans.

Once the federal gun ban(s) were in place, school shootings started taking off.

Wikipedia has a list of schools massacres. They include arson and bombings and knife attacks. They include colleges and universities. Looking only at school shootings in the United States, not colleges or universities, which were not affected by the federal school gun bans, there are 21 school shootings listed.

The earliest school shooting listed in the U.S. is in 1966. But there are two school bombings listed, one in 1927, in Bath Township, Michigan, and another in 1959 at the Poe Elementary School in Houston Texas.   School shootings outside the United States are recorded as early as  1902 in the Droysidd massacre in Droysigg, Austria-Hungary, 1913 in Bremen Germany, and 1925 in the Wilno School massacre in Wilno, Poland. As the earliest event in the United States was recorded in 1927, we will start the time of the comparison in 1927, instead of 1902. From 1927 to 1990, there were 7 mass school shootings in the United States, using the Wikipedia article definition.

They were the Mesa School shooting in 1966 (5 killed), Olean High School in 1974 (3), Cleveland Elementary School in 1979 (2), Los Angeles Elementary in 1984 (2), Oakland Elementary in 1988 (2), The Illinois Massacre in 1988 (4), and the Stockton School Yard shooting in 1989 (5).  The total fatalities for those shootings were 23.

After 1990, there were 14 mass school shootings. There was the Lindhurst High School in 1992 (4), The Frontier Middle School in 1996 (3), the Heath High School in 1997 (3), the Pearl High School in 1997 (3), the Westside Middle School in 1998(5), the Thurston High School in 1998 (4), the Costa Mesa school in 1999(2), Columbine in 1999 (13), the Santee High School in 2001 (2), Red Lake MN in 2005 (9), West Nickle Mines School in 2006(5), Chardon High School in 2012(3), Sandy Hook 2012 (27), and the Maryville School in 2014 (4).

From 1927 to 1990, there were 7 U.S. school shootings on the list, with a total of 23 deaths in 63 years (including 1990). From 1990 to 2016, there were 14, with 60 deaths in 26 years (not including 1990).  Before the gun bans, about .37 deaths per year.  After the gun bans, about 2.3 deaths per year.  After the gun bans were put in place, the death rate by school shootings of two or more per incident increased by a factor of 6.

The simple numbers are not a fair comparison. The population has been growing. Per capita rates should be used.

The rough average  population from 1927 to 1990 was 206 million. The rough average population for 1990 to 2016 is 286 million. The number of fatalities per year per million from 1927 to 1990 was .37/206 = .0018 per million.  The rate of fatalities per year per million from 1990 to 2016 was 2.3/286 =.0080. 

Adjusted for population, the rate of fatalities from school shootings increased 4.4 times from before the school gun bans to after the school gun bans.

It we toss out the Lindhurst shooting (1992) as happening during the transition period from 1990 to 1994, it does not change the numbers much.  It reduces the total after the ban fatalities to 56, and also reduces the number of years to 1995-2016 or 22. Then the rate becomes 2.5 per year.  The rough population average goes up to 295 million. The per capita rate increases to 2.5/295 million per year or .085/million per year.  That is 4.7 times the 1927-1990 numbers.

It is clear that the gun bans did not do what they were claimed to be designed to do.

From 1927 to 1968, there were almost no federal gun regulations. Guns could be bought through the mail, or over the counter for cash without background checks. Semi-auto guns were available since 1900. Anti-aircraft cannon and anti-tank cannon and ammunition could be purchased mail-order.  There was only one school shooting during that period, and it was in 1966.

With increasing federal gun control, the school shootings increased dramatically.

What caused the increase?  There are two likely candidates. First, the gun bans make the schools inviting targets. Potential murderers know that they can kill more people when there is no opposition. The number that they kill is important, because they want fame.  The second is the copycat effect. The establishment media in the United States want gun bans and more restrictions on gun ownership and use. The 1990 Gun Free School Zone Act was a ban on guns within a thousand feet of a school, effectively banning the carry of guns in most cities and towns. The 1996 act included a minor change that exempted people with concealed carry permits. The 1994 act gave incentives for schools to ban guns in the schools. The media loved the restrictions. The establishment media use school shootings to push for more gun bans and restrictions on gun ownership and use by giving enormous coverage to school shootings.

The copycat effect is well known and understood. When an event is highly publicized, people who desperately want fame will become "copy cats" and attempt to duplicate or surpass the previous incident. It is why school shootings happen in clusters, and why the number of victims have been increasing. The Establishment media know this, but they want more ratings and more gun bans.

Gun bans do not directly cause school shootings. They make schools a preferred target. Exaggerated coverage of school shootings are seen as a way to obtain more gun bans and more ratings.  The media give school shootings an extraordinary amount of coverage. The extraordinary media coverage creates incentives for more school shootings, and an increasing desire by the murderers to "break the record".


©2017 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice and link are included.

Gun Watch

[marktwain]

School shootings increased 440 percent after the federal school gun bans were put in place.

[umgud]

Gun handling and safety classes need to start in grade school. Rifle teams in Jr or High school.

[moovova]

OMG! What’s next...a resurgence in rifle racks in the back of pickem’up trucks?

Seriously though...would love to see gun safety classes taught as indicated in comment #2. That would go further in saving young lives from accidental shootings than anything else.

[fatboy]

My oldest sister was our state Jr. 4 position smallbore indoor champion her junior year in high school. Her team, consisting of 3 other boys, two who went to her high school, the other a different school, had their pictures (team with gunz) in both of their HS year books, even though their shooting was not a school activity.

Four years later, my brother and me along with two other boys each from different schools had a similar experience and a yearbook photo. My sister was class of 1972, I was class of 1976. Times have changed.

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

The anti-gun movement began with the murder of John Kennedy and picked up steam with the murder of Bobby Kennedy.

“Today we begin to disarm the criminal and the careless and the insane. All of our people who are deeply concerned in this country about law and order should hail this day.”-LBJ signing the 1968 Gun Control Act into law.

How’d that work out for you America!

[WildHighlander57]

Thanks for posting!

Bookmarking!

[Amendment10]

Thank you for referencing that article marktwain. Please note that the following critique is directed at the article and not at you.

"It wasn't "school officials" that decided to ban guns in schools. It was federal legislators. School shootings shot up after federal legislators passed the bans on guns in schools. [emphasis added]"

FR: Never Accept the Premise of Your Opponent’s Argument

Regardless that the Founding States constitutionally delegated to the feds the specific power to regulate military firearms, such power reasonably justified by Clauses 12, 16 and other clauses in Congress’s constitutional Article I, Section 8-limited powers, please consider the following.

It remains that the states have never expressly constitutionally delegated to the feds the specific powers to regulate either civilian-related firearms, or to decide policy for non-military INTRAstate school activities. This is evidenced by the following excerpts from the writings of Thomas Jefferson and a previous generation of state sovereignty-respecting Supreme Court justices.

• On a few articles of more general and necessary use, the suppression in due season will doubtless be right, but the great mass of the articles on which impost is paid is foreign luxuries, purchased by those only who are rich enough to afford themselves the use of them. Their patriotism would certainly prefer its continuance and application to the great purposes of the public education, roads, rivers, canals, and such other objects of public improvement as it may be thought proper to add to the constitutional enumeration of federal powers [emphases added]”—Thomas Jefferson : Sixth Annual Message to Congress

• ”From the accepted doctrine that the United States is a government of delegated powers, it follows that those not expressly granted, or reasonably to be implied from such as are conferred, are reserved to the states, or to the people. To forestall any suggestion to the contrary, the Tenth Amendment was adopted. The same proposition, otherwise stated, is that powers not granted are prohibited [emphasis added].” —United States v. Butler, 1936.

So federal gun regulations for non-military related school purposes are unconstitutional imo.

In fact, it is disturbing that federal gun regulations for non-military related arms seem to have started appearing in the books during FDR Administration, FDR and the Congress at that time infamous for making laws which they had no express constitutional authority to make.

Franklin Roosevelt: The Father of Gun Control

Regarding unconstitutional expansion of federal government powers, when the states quit sitting on their hands and repeal the ill-conceived 17th Amendment, that amendment effectively repealing the whole Constitution imo, the repeal amendment should include a provision that does the following.

The repeal amendment needs to expressly required the judicial system to presume guilt on the federal government’s part for attempting to unconstitutionally expand its powers by means of any legislation, regulation or action by the federal government which is not clearly justified by any of the powers that the states have expressly constitutionally delegated to the feds.

"In every event, I would rather construe so narrowly as to oblige the nation to amend, and thus declare what powers they would agree to yield, than too broadly, and indeed, so broadly as to enable the executive and the Senate to do things which the Constitution forbids." --Thomas Jefferson: The Anas, 1793.

Drain the swamp! Drain the swamp!

Remember in November ’18 !

Since Trump entered the ’16 presidential race too late for patriots to make sure that there were state sovereignty-respecting candidates on the primary ballots, patriots need make sure that such candidates are on the ’18 primary ballots so that they can be elected to support Trump in draining the unconstitutionally big federal government swamp.

Such a Congress will also be able to finish draining the swamp with respect to getting the remaining state sovereignty-ignoring, activist Supreme Court justices off of the bench.

In fact, if Justice Gorsuch turns out to be a liberal Trojan Horse then we will need 67 patriot senators to remove a House-impeached Gorsuch from office.

Noting that the primaries start in Iowa and New Hampshire in February ‘18, patriots need to challenge candidates for federal office in the following way.

While I Googled the primary information above concerning Iowa and New Hampshire, FReeper iowamark brought to my attention that the February primaries for these states apply only to presidential election years. And after doing some more scratching, since primary dates for most states for 2018 elections probably haven’t been uploaded at this time (March 14, 2017), FReepers will need to find out primary dates from sources and / or websites in their own states.

Patriots need to qualify candidates by asking them why the Founding States made the Constitution’s Section 8 of Article I; to limit (cripple) the federal government’s powers.

Patriots also need to find candidates that are knowledgeable of the Supreme Court's clarifications of the federal government’s limited powers listed below.

• “Congress is not empowered to tax for those purposes which are within the exclusive province of the States.” —Justice John Marshall, Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.

• ”State inspection laws, health laws, and laws for regulating the internal commerce of a State, and those which respect turnpike roads, ferries, &c. are not within the power granted to Congress [emphasis added].” —Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.

• ”From the accepted doctrine that the United States is a government of delegated powers, it follows that those not expressly granted, or reasonably to be implied from such as are conferred, are reserved to the states, or to the people. To forestall any suggestion to the contrary, the Tenth Amendment was adopted. The same proposition, otherwise stated, is that powers not granted are prohibited [emphasis added].” —United States v. Butler, 1936.

[MileHi]

I appreciate your posts. So, how do we get around the “general welfare” and “interstate commerce” nonsense?

[beelzepug]

How’d his Great Society work out??