Friday is the 19th anniversary of the Columbine school massacre in 1999, and high-school students nationwide are staying out of school to mark the occasion. The Washington Post has spent the past year determining how many children have been exposed to gun violence during school hours since Columbine. Beyond the dead and wounded, children who witness the violence or cower behind locked doors to hide from it can be profoundly traumatized. The federal government does not track school shootings, so the Post pieced together its numbers from news articles, open-source databases, law enforcement reports and calls to schools and police departments. The count now stands at more than 206,000 children at 211 schools.
The Post has found that at least 131 children, educators and other people have been killed in assaults, and another 271 have been injured. In 2018 alone, there have already been 12 shootings, the highest number at this point during any year since 1999. The Post’s search for more shootings will continue, and it’s possible reporters will locate additional incidents from previous years. One person was injured in a shooting at Forest High School in Ocala, Fl. Friday morning, a short time before a planned student walkout to protest school violence, the Post reports. The injured person was being treated by paramedics, said the Marion County Sheriff’s Office. According to the Ocala Star-Banner, one student shot another in the ankle. The father of a witness to the shooting told the newspaper that the shooter was standing in the hallway and shot at a classroom door that was shut, then dropped the weapon, ran and tried to hide.