The most shocking numbers you’re going to hear of today are not the 126 fines meted out to 83 Downing Street staff, with five being the greatest number accrued by one particular ignominious member of the PM’s top team. No, not even close. The most shocking statistic is that another nineteen children and two teachers have been killed in a school shooting in Texas. Here are a couple more for you to contemplate. Over 390 million guns are owned by US civilians and, in 2020, guns overtook car crashes to become the leading cause of death for US children and teenagers.

Today’s horrific turn of events in Uvalde, Texas, along with other recent massacres in El Paso, Santa Fey and Dayton, have again brought gun violence against children back centre stage. Mind, in a country with 120 guns in civilian ownership per 100 people, it never seems to out of the news for long. As shocking, is the fact that recently there were sixty-one separate shooting fatalities in their schools, the highest number since records began. Just consider those statistics again: for every 100 people there are 120 guns in circulation and, in one year alone, they were used sixty-one times to murder children and/or their teachers. I fully concede that legislation will do nothing to reduce this number as it would be akin to closing the barn door after the horse has bolted, but action wrt future possession and ownership must now be taken.

The scenes of the worst tragedies are, even here in the UK, seared into all our minds: Columbine, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook and Parkland. So, when the idea of formally arming teachers is mooted, I, like all rational logical liberals, can’t quite believe my ears. WTF. Shoot-outs in the staff room. Stand-offs behind the bicycle sheds. But, as I look into the matter further, incredulously, unbelievably, does this approach actually have a point?

We’re now painfully aware that US educational establishments, notwithstanding metal-detecting frames, on-site police and uniformed armed private-protection personnel, are known for their relatively low-levels of security and access control, and consequently suffer a disproportionately high number of attacks. Furthermore, they’re, often committed by their own students: twelve pupils at Columbine killed by two students, aged seventeen and eighteen; thirty two murdered at Virginia Tech by a twenty-three year old student; twenty six slaughtered at Sandy Hook by a man barely out of college; seventeen at Parkland by a recently expelled pupil. Today’s massacre was committed by a mere eighteen year old wielding a deadly hand gun and semi-automatic rifle. Subsequently, it’s fair to assume that, as radical gun legislation is not going to be implemented, this shocking, scandalous situation is going to continue and the only questions are where’s next, and when? Many US educators now consider their main priority is primarily to keep children safe. And then to educate them.

The intensive and, it has to be said, apparently thorough, School Active-Shooter Response Training Courses seek to prepare teachers for what many consider an inevitability within their classrooms. Even within the elementary school system (infant/junior) all pupils actively practice ‘lockdowns’ where the schools run through the steps and actions to be taken during an armed attack. In short, the succession of steps are run, and if you can’t run, hide, and if you have no alternative, fight back. The guidance for teachers and older students states “Be aggressive. Improvise weapons. Commit to your actions.” It is also policy to keep any armed teacher’s identity entirely secret and it is hoped that the ‘armed personnel on campus’ signs will provide the deterrent intended.

The scenario obviously raises the question of ‘what would you do?’ It is a sobering thought. Teachers, by their very nature, are non-aggressive, non-confrontational individuals. They’re about as far from gun-toting, trigger-happy cowboys as can be. Their instinct is to help, encourage, nurture and negotiate, and protect. They’re going to put themselves in harm’s way by naturally coming between the danger and their charges. They’re going to go into that room, put themselves in the line of fire, whether they have a gun or not.

Other than dramatic action on all level of current and future gun control (much more than the recently discussed nationwide ‘red-flag laws’), which I genuinely believe is NOT going to happen any time soon, I don’t claim to have any answers to this issue and keep returning to my default position of questioning how actually increasing the number of guns can help ease the situation? How can a Glock in the gym or Luger in the library solve anything? I remain largely sceptical about the wisdom of arming school staff and it remains a terrible indictment of life in the US but do applaud those having a sincere and wide-reaching conversation about the implications and effects of such policies. I envy them neither the debate nor the possible outcomes.

So, when exactly did America become this crazy trigger-happy, shoot-children-first-ask-later country?

There was a time when school shootings, school killing sprees, did not exist. Weapons existed, guns, knives, bombs proliferated but schools, children as targets, remained strictly off-limits. 1999’s Columbine massacre put paid to that and spawned the situation America now finds itself horribly gripped by: Alberta’s WR Myers High School (1999), Virginia Tech (2007), Jokela High School (2007), Sandy Hook (2012), Isla Vista (2014), Moneta (2015), Parkland (2018) and now Uvalde (2022). Incredibly, Columbine no longer even ranks in the ‘top 10’ of American mass murders.

Dave Cullen, author of the definitive ‘Columbine’ and ‘Parkland’ books, identified, in the aftermath of Parkland, the first signs of change, a potential reversal of the gun violence that continues to blight America’s school campuses. By removing the attention you remove the air the assassin needs. He realised that the vast majority of recent mass murderers were emulating the Columbine killers. Access to their ‘manifesto’ was freely available, every explicit detail was to be found in the ether, chatrooms dedicated to the attack existed and online Columbine role-playing games can be easily obtained. In the wrong mind these details can all be glorified and, referring to these massacres as ‘spectacle murders’, the author believes they are essentially performances and the social media platform is their stage.

A central feature in the killings is that, contrary to initial belief, victims are seldom, if ever, targeted. Indiscriminate shooting is the nature of the beast here and when two propane bombs were subsequently discovered at Columbine it became clear the murderers were intent on killing a huge number of their peers, not a specific group. It’s not about the individual, it’s about the number. The body count is all-important and a further phrase has been coined to capture this, ‘performance violence’. Victims are collateral damage in the service of an ever-increasing body count. Hard though it is to countenance, these gunmen make no demands prior to their slaughter, accept they’re invariably going to be killed in the ensuing carnage and merely want to kill for the lifetime’s notoriety they anticipate will follow. And here’s the chink of light.

The dignified yet decisive reaction of Parkland’s students turned the spotlight of attention on the victims and survivors not the perpetrator. Building on the ‘No Notoriety’ movement, which requests media neither names nor shows the killer, the students did something more powerful than the assassin and he was totally eclipsed, to such an extent that virtually no-one can even recall his name. Furthermore, following the killings, over two million people marched in support of gun safety, the largest protest since Vietnam. Student survivors Emma Gonzalez and David Hogg called out the BS on a national policy that saw gun-ownership flourish and for the first time in living memory, gun-safety, specifically gun-control legislation was, albeit briefly, back on the nationwide political agenda. Sadly, it has not been enough to help prevent today’s appalling carnage but if American society can reverse this trend and place more restrictive controls around firearms then the slaughtered students may not have died in vain.