Most school gun incidents aren’t mass shootings
Keyon Robinson was just a month away from graduating from high school, when he made a rash decision that has shaken his community.
Keyon Robinson was just a month away from graduating from high school, when he made a rash decision that has shaken his community.
After fighting with a relative last May, he took a gun, placed it in his backpack and headed to his school in Oak Park, a suburb that borders Chicago’s West Side. Robinson insists he never intended to hurt anyone at the school. He was angry about the fight and scared someone would come after him. The firearm, a so-called ghost gun with no serial number that he’d bought via social media, was his security blanket.
Eleven days after his arrest, a man in Buffalo, N.Y., gunned down 10 people in a grocery store. Ten days later, another gunman massacred 19 children and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, in the worst elementary school shooting since Sandy Hook nearly a decade earlier.
While those stories put the nation on edge for obvious reasons, cases like Robinson’s are more typical, and guns are brought to school more often than people may think. Most gun incidents in and around schools are not mass shootings but altercations that escalate, according to a running tally by the Center for Homeland Defense and Security’s K-12 Shooting Database.
In Robinson’s case, no one was hurt. He never fired the gun, kept it in the backpack. Police, who’d been tipped off, arrested him outside the school as he returned from lunch.
The incident has stirred up the community — and caused the high school to tighten its security.
Security experts say school’s are a microcosm of a world where carrying a gun is becoming more common. The firearm Robinson had was a “ghost gun” – a gun without a serial number that he bought from someone via the social media site Snapchat. Police in Illinois and elsewhere say they’re seeing more of the difficult-to-trace guns, causing more concern.
Some parents want metal detectors and other measures in place. But those same experts say that’s not necessarily the best deterrent or feasible for large schools like Oak Park and River Forest High School, which has about 3,400 students.
Mo Canady, who heads the National Association of School Resource Officers, says securing doors around a school and encouraging students and teachers to report suspicious behavior are among methods that work better.
But others, like Carmine Marceno, sheriff in Lee County, Florida, are taking a tough stance — arresting children as young as age 10 for posting online threats to schools. He’s also released their mug shots to the public.
Officials in Oak Park are also reestablishing ties with local police after dropping their school resource officer program in 2020, after a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd while others stood by.
Keyon Robinson, now 19, was allowed to finish his schoolwork to graduate this summer. He says he supports having police in schools, especially after his gun incident.
As a first-time offender, he’s also hoping for a probation instead of prison time. Whether he gets a second chance remains to be seen.
