SCHOOL SHOOTINGSSchool Shootings Are a National Security Threat
“National security” or “homeland security” is usually conceptualized as a (foreign) threat to the state and its capital and to a government and society’s ability to survive and function, at home and abroad. But just because school shootings are a domestic, internal threat posed by nonstate actors does not mean they should not be considered a national security issue.
In the year since a gunman butchered nineteen students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, the United States has suffered at least forty school shootings—perhaps most notably at the University of Virginia, Michigan State University, and the Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee. A bipartisan gun deal was passed last June, but contained only modest provisions. The cycle—horrendous violence, a clamor for change, and then a steady fading from public view—was thus repeated numerous times, each new round of gunfire offering another thundering reminder to American children and young adults that they have been left alone on the frontlines of our nation’s love affair with guns.
Indeed, perhaps the most tragic part of each of these latest shootings was how utterly unsurprising they were—how utterly prepared the students were for their fate and how utterly defenseless they were against the wrath of an AR-15. An opinion piece authored by the Washington Post editorial board after a shooting targeting the Edmund Burke School in Washington, DC’s Van Ness neighborhood in April 2022 commented that the community had been “lucky”—because the shooting was not worse. That is the reality of childhood and education in the United States in 2023. Over the past year, hearts have been shattered by the war crimes committed against children in Ukraine (over eight thousand civilians have already been killed in that conflict), and yet Americans are almost completely numb to the horrors experienced by children here. Students in the United States are now conditioned to believe it is a question of when, not if, they will find themselves the target of a school shooting. The sober lesson and sad reality: there is absolutely no good reason for U.S. students, at any school or level of education, to comfortably believe they are safe from gun violence.
Throughout the emergence of the school shooting epidemic as a major social and political issue over the past twenty-four years, it has typically been relegated to the sidelines—seen as an inconvenience and not as an important national priority. Why? Because “national security” or “homeland security” is usually conceptualized as a (foreign) threat to the state and its capital and to a government and society’s ability to survive and function, at home and abroad.