Heeding the Signs Part 5

GETTING EVEN WITH GUNS
The greatest health threat to American school children is not disease, but guns, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A few mind-numbing statistics: In the United States, a child dies of gunshot wounds every two hours, the equivalent of a classroom of 25 children every two days; the rate of firearm deaths among teens is 75 percent higher than 20 years ago; American children are 12 times more likely to die from guns than their peers in 25 other industrialized nations, including Israel and Northern Ireland.

Despite the best efforts of school officials and lawmakers across the country to keep weapons out of schools, guns still show up in hallways, lockers, and on playgrounds. Handguns, small and easy to hide, are especially difficult for schools to detect and control.

The day before the Thurston shooting, Kip Kinkel was expelled from school for buying a stolen gun from another student and hiding it in his locker. That evening he allegedly shot both parents with a .22-caliber semiautomatic rifle his father had bought him the previous year (a gun reportedly kept in a locked cabinet under the Kinkel parents' bed, along with other guns Bill Kinkel had confiscated from his son.) In the following days, among the arsenal of guns and bombs secreted in Kip's room and around the Kinkel house, police found a pistol and sawed-off shotgun. Both had been bought from classmates at school, according to news reports.

School security experts estimate that 80 percent of the firearms students bring to school come from home. It is no surprise that the potential for suicide, accidental death, and school shootings is greatly magnified when there is a gun in the house.

The three guns Barry Loukaitis carried into his algebra class in Moses Lake, Washington, belonged to his father, who had taught him to shoot. Friends testified in court that Barry used to play at home with his family guns as if they were toys. When he decided to "get even" with a classmate who had teased him, Barry had only to go to an unlocked gun cabinet in the living room for a high-powered rifle and a handgun, and to the family car for a second handgun.

The 12-gauge, three-foot shotgun Evan Ramsey took to school hidden in his baggy jeans had hung for years on an open rack next to the front door in his foster home. "It's so normal here to have access to guns," his foster mother Sue Hare, then district superintendent of schools, told the Boston Globe after the shooting. She had bought the weapon years earlier for bird hunting, she said, and didn't consider it capable of killing anyone.

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