By Amanda Musa | CNN
Many Americans think of school shootings as mass casualty events involving an adolescent with an assault-style weapon. But a new study says that most recent school shootings orchestrated by teenagers do not fit that image — and they are often related to community violence.
The study, published Monday in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, analyzed 253 school shootings carried out by 262 adolescents in the US between 1990 and 2016.
It found that these adolescents were responsible for only a handful of mass casualty shootings, defined as those involving four or more gunshot fatalities. About half of the shootings analyzed — 119 — involved at least one death. Among the events, seven killed four or more people.
A majority of the shootings analyzed also involved handguns rather than assault rifles or shotguns, and they were often the result of “interpersonal disputes,” according to the researchers from University of South Carolina and University of Florida.
“When you look at gun violence across the country, a big subset of that is suicide and community violence, which is largely committed by the use of handguns, not assault rifles and so on,” said Dr. Chethan Sathya, a pediatric surgeon and trauma director at Cohen Children’s Medical Center and director of the Center for Gun Violence Prevention at Northwell Health.
Sathya, who was not involved in the new study, says it is important to highlight the difference between a mass shooting at a school and a school shooting brought on by community violence because the perpetrators often look different and are committing these acts of violence for different reasons. Therefore, the respective solutions look very different, as well.
“You’re going to have the classic, very tragic mass shootings where someone comes in with a manifesto, and they want to kill the maximum number of people,” he said. “You’re also going to have gang-related violence, shootings that happen at school but have…
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