'Please help me': Kids with guns fueled a record number of school shootings in 2021

[Celerity]

Bennie Hargrove was 13 when he was shot on the third day of 8th grade. His alleged killer was 13, too.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2021/12/31/2021-school-shootings-record/



The day before he died, Bennie Hargrove told his grandmother he needed advice. It was Aug. 12, the second day of eighth grade, and Bennie confided that he had stopped a classmate and some other teens from beating up a younger boy at their Albuquerque middle school earlier that day. The 13-year-old’s disclosure made Vanessa Sawyer nervous. Sometimes, she said she told her grandson, it’s better to mind your own business. “That’s just not in me,” she recalled Bennie saying.

The next afternoon, Bennie confronted the bully, Juan Saucedo Jr., near the school track, another child would later tell police. Bennie asked Juan, also 13, to quit picking on his friends, insisting that if he wanted to fight someone, he should fight Bennie. “I’m done with this b----,” the child heard Juan say in Spanish just before he pulled a black handgun out of his backpack and, according to police, fired six rounds into Bennie’s body.



The shooting at Washington Middle School was one of at least 42 acts of gun violence committed on K-12 campuses during regular hours in 2021, the most during any year since at least 1999, according to a Washington Post database. The nation smashed the previous record of 30, despite most schools remaining closed to in-person classes for the first two months of the year.

In total, about 34,000 students were exposed to gun violence in 2021, bringing the tally since the Columbine High massacre to more than 285,000. It’s impossible to know with certainty what’s driven the surge in incidents, though researchers have speculated that a spike in gun sales, soaring rates of overall violence, the pandemic and the chaos of the past year all played some role.



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