NEWS‘It’s such a common thing now’: School shootings reached record levels in 2022

When a student opened fire at her Detroit high school in November 2021, killing four students and injuring seven others, Rebekah Schuler let go of the idea of ever feeling truly safe in school again.

“We’re being forced to normalize learning amid a constant fear of guns ringing inside or outside of our classrooms,” said Schuler, 18, a senior at Oxford, the site of one among a record 188 school shootings during the 2021-22 academic year.

That year’s count of school shootings was the highest in more than two decades, according to a federal report released this month. During the previous year, there were half that number of school shootings — 93 — noted the report, the U.S. Department of Education’s latest tally of that gun violence but also of in-school suicides, bullying and other kinds of victimization of pupils and educators.

After retail and other business settings, educational settings were the second most common location of active shooter incidents, researchers found.

The school shooting data underlay a hard reality, say youth who’ve survived them or endured the threat of one: Shootings have become an accepted risk of school life.

Read more: Youth Today