A New School Year Brings More Weapons
As of this writing, there have been at least 225 reported weapons incidents in South Carolina public and private schools during the last four school years alone.
Content warning: descriptions of violence.
A few years back, a school colleague handed me something I couldn’t immediately identify and told me it was for my wife, who was then a teacher at a neighboring school. It was tan and heavy, with a surface texture like pantyhose. It was, he told me, a bulletproof garment designed to fit into a handbag.
During my last year as a teacher, one of our school days was interrupted by a mysterious message telling us to remain in class and keep students out of the hallways. We later learned that a student had stabbed another student repeatedly in the hallway. One of my coworkers described being covered in blood after helping the student who was stabbed.
During the first week of the present school year, three different students brought weapons— two knives and one gun— into the high school where my wife used to work. At least one of these weapons made it past the school metal detector without setting it off.
And as most schools entered their first or second week of classes, there had already been at least six reported weapons incidents and one bomb threat in South Carolina.
While weapon-related violence in American schools is relatively rare compared with other public places, that kind of violence is common enough in our country, and seeps into our schools with enough frequency, that the majority of American teachers report being concerned about school shootings.
As of this writing, there have been at least 225 reported weapons incidents in South Carolina public and private schools (meaning, incidents that were reported by districts and/ or news media) during the past four school years alone.
We really don’t know how many guns enter our schools each year, but it’s a lot.
It’s very important to note that South Carolina includes official reports of firearm incidents on the school report cards used to evaluate and rank schools— this, along with a general fear of bad publicity, likely discourages at least some school districts from publicly revealing information about school weapons if they can avoid doing so.
Where possible, I’ve included internal documents showing a few incidents that didn’t make the news, but there are almost certainly more that can’t be documented. Therefore, this data— like state report card data— is probably less useful for comparing specific schools or districts, and more useful for getting a sense of how widespread weapons incidents and violence are in our public schools.
As some of the researchers cited below have attested, we need better studies of exactly how, why, and how often weapons are entering our schools. Until we do, we are sometimes trying to navigate this problem through a fog of uncertainty.
The vast majority of the incidents that were reported in South Carolina involved students bringing guns to school and/ or making threats to shoot people at school.
In an in-depth 2022 analysis of South Carolina-specific data, the Post and Courier found a large spike in school shooting incidents, resulting in the most school shootings in 47 years.
How does South Carolina compare to the rest of the country?
According to NPR, 2022 was also a record-breaking year for school shootings in the US, and by 2023, the leading cause of death for adolescents was gun violence. According to school shooting prevention group Everytown, “In 2023 there were at least 158 incidents of gunfire on school grounds, resulting in 45 deaths and 106 injuries nationally.”
The Palmetto State isn’t alone, either, in starting the 2024-25 school year with threats of violence and weapons in schools. For example, yesterday, August 23, two school transportation employees in Oklahoma got into a “verbal altercation”. When SROs broke it up, they found a gun on one of the employees. On Tuesday, a high school student in San Antonio brought a gun onto the campus of a school he did not attend. On Monday, two adults exchanged gunfire during a high school spirit night in Louisiana. And on Monday, two students were shot— and one of them, a sixteen-year-old, died— outside a Philadelphia school.
According to a database compiled by the Naval Postgraduate School Center for Homeland Defense and Security, between 1970 and 2022 there were 2,069 school shooting incidents in the US, resulting in 1,937 injuries and 684 deaths. During that same time period, there were at least 46 school shooting incidents in South Carolina according to an analysis of the database.
According to The American School Shooting Study (TASSS), from 1990 to 2016 an average of about 24 school shootings occurred each year. About a quarter of these incidents were found to be “accidental discharges”.
Obviously, individual motivators and opportunities for school weapons incidents and violence are likely very complicated, but South Carolina and similar states have seen a disproportionate incidences of gun deaths.
According to the National Institute of Justice, “The South had over three times as many school shootings as the Northeast.”
This might be a reflection of the fact that South Carolina and similar states have a disproportionate amount of gun deaths, overall. The most recently available CDC data shows South Carolina ranked tenth in the nation for gun deaths, with 1,105 firearm-related deaths in 2022. According to Johns Hopkins University’s school of public health, “In general, the states with the highest gun death rates tend to be states in the South or Mountain West, with weaker gun laws and higher levels of gun ownership, while gun death rates are lower in the Northeast, where gun violence prevention laws are stronger.”
Gun regulations
In many states, gun regulations are not only, as Johns Hopkins describes them, “weaker,” but may actively encourage the presence of guns in public, by allowing more people to carry them legally and without training.
For example, in March of this year, SC Governor Henry McMaster signed into law a bill that allows any person eighteen or older to carry firearms in the state without a permit. The new law is itself an expansion of 2021’s open carry with permit law, which similarly allowed individuals to carry guns into most settings, but did have at least some minimal requirements that those carrying the guns had to take a course on gun safety.
Taken together, the recent changes to the laws in South Carolina mean that, according SLED, “individuals 18 years old and older to carry firearms openly or concealed without a permit” and that guns can be left in vehicles without restriction. According to the Associated Press, South Carolina is one of 29 US states with permitless open carry laws, “including nearly every state in the Deep South.”
In short, it’s hard to imagine that making it easier for almost anyone over 18 to simply obtain a gun and carry it legally in public— including onto school campuses, as long as the weapons remains in a vehicle— has not contributed to the increase in firearm incidents. According to the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED), weapons incidents became more common in the year immediately following the first open carry bill, even as overall crime was down.
A large number of incidents in South Carolina schools have involved students or adults— often parents, but in a few cases, school employees— either intentionally or accidentally bringing weapons illegally onto school campuses.
And, of course, it’s likely that common sense told the majority of legislators that this was exactly what would result from the new laws. While the 2024 legislation was billed as the “South Carolina Constitutional Carry, Second Amendment Preservation Act of 2024”— suggesting an expansive and unlimited right to bear arms— it’s notable that the General Assembly did exempt a number of public places from this right, namely the State House and other government buildings, as well as school buildings and jails.
This suggests that not only do legislators recognize reasonable limits on the second amendment, but that they, themselves, fear the results of too many guns around them. In fact, Charleston Representative JA Moore experienced a possible side effect of “Constitutional Carry” firsthand last week when, as he told the local NBC affiliate, a driver brandished a gun at him as he was parking to pick his daughter up from school.
Lawmakers have recently passed similar laws in many of the states that have already experienced gun violence in or near schools this year. For example, Louisiana also allows “open carry” and allows the storage of guns in cars. Kentucky’s open carry law, according to one of the first studies of its kind, was correlated with “a direct significant increase in pointing of firearm arrests as well as illegal discharge of firearm events”. Texas also has an open carry law on the books.
And according to research compiled by RAND, “There is supportive evidence that shall-issue concealed-carry laws may increase total homicides, firearm homicides, and violent crime.”
Mental health issues
A common response to calls for practical gun regulations is that we need to first address mental health issues.
While few would argue against improving the country’s mental health services, mental health issues, alone, do not make people more likely to engage in violent acts. According to the American Psychological Association (APA),
Although many highly publicized shootings have involved persons with serious mental illness, it must be recognized that persons with serious mental illness commit only a small proportion of firearm-related homicides; the problem of gun violence cannot be resolved simply through efforts focused on serious mental illness (Webster & Vernick, 2013a). Furthermore, the overwhelming majority of people with serious mental illness do not engage in violence toward others and should not be stereotyped as dangerous (Sirotich, 2008).
The limited available research specifically focused on school shootings suggests that many school shooters do have some type of broadly-defined “mental health issues”. For example, TASSS found that 25 of 35 studied school shooting perpetrators had at least one “mental health issues… ranging from severe cognitive impairment, to suicidal ideation, to anger management and mood swings, depression and anxiety, and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.” But as the authors of the study pointed out, one reason these mostly common mental health issues were reported could be that the media is often looking for them: “It is possible more reporters diligently investigated the mass shooters, and due to conventional wisdom specifically looked for mental health issues, and were therefore more likely to find evidence of psychological issues (‘look & you shall find’)”.
In any case, identified mental health issues are very common in adolescents. According to one estimate from the Department of Health and Human Services, roughly half of all adolescents have had a mental health disorder at some point. And obviously a vanishingly small number of these students are involved in school shootings. So while addressing student mental health is vital, by itself it isn’t a plausible solution to gun violence in schools, and obviously targeting students with mental health issues as a group is counterproductive and unlikely to reduce school violence.
Metal detectors, “target hardening,” and technological interventions
Research on the effectiveness of metal detectors in schools is mixed at best, with little hard evidence that they reduce violence in schools.
In fact, according to TASSS, although “metal detectors also possibly increased the odds (modestly significant) it was a non-fatal shooting” when the perpetrators was a student, at the same time, “metal detectors increased the odds it was a fatal attack for the adult school shooters.”
One of the TASSS authors, University of South Carolina criminology professor Brent Klein, had previously found that,
We know that at least one-third of [school shooters] unevenly rely on system one mental models, so their actions stem from minimal rational planning and thoughtful decision-making. Hence, target hardening will likely have null effects… Although controlling entry into the school may be more reasonable for these shooters, it is also possible that they might plan their way around such measures. They may sneak past security, for example, or get a friend to open a side door so they can bypass the metal detectors. With millions of dollars spent each year on fortifying schools, our energies and resources may be better spent elsewhere.
Klein goes on to emphasize that these findings are based on very limited research about metal detector use in schools that actually went on to have school shootings.
The research we do have suggests there just isn’t enough evidence to judge the effectiveness of metal detectors in schools. According to one review of the research, searches of students without using metal detectors may actually be more effective at turning up weapons than those with metal detectors, and one study found that in airports, metal detectors had a failure rate as high as 95% at detecting weapons. The research suggests that “the human element” may be a large factor in why the technology doesn’t always work, which makes sense: school administrators and teachers are not trained in security tasks, and most larger schools simply do not have the capacity to train or hire enough staff to screen thousands of children and adults every time they enter or exit the school throughout the day.
On top of this “security theater” like metal detectors may make students feel less safe and less welcome at school.
Two South Carolina school districts, Florence 1 and Spartanburg 6, have gone a step beyond metal detectors in deploying body scanners which, according to the manufacturer, Evolv, can detect firearms. Part of the argument for purchasing the scanners was that metal detectors had not always been effective.
How effective are these scanners? According to Vice,
Evolv does not publicly provide any research on how accurately the Evolv Express scanners detect weapons, or how many false positives they turn up—an area of particular concern to civil rights advocates, who note that minority students are more likely to be pulled aside and searched and that discipline in schools falls disproportionately on the shoulders of black students, contributing to the school-to-prison pipeline.
And it’s unclear whether the South Carolina districts knew when they adopted the scanners in 2020 that they had problems detecting some types of weapons. According to a story about their adoption across the border in North Carolina’s Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS), a 2022 field test in Ohio had shown that “while the scanners detected almost every gun, they missed one particular kind of gun on two walkthroughs, failed to detect about four out of every 10 knives and had mixed results for a certain type of pipe, which could be used in a bomb”.
CMS has paid Evolv about $16.5 million; in South Carolina they cost $364,000 to lease for four years.
But setting aside expense and even questions of efficacy, technology to “harden schools” also creates a danger of harming student mental health and violating privacy, and of making students and staff feel like they are attending a prison instead of a place of learning. This raises the question of why we often focus on turning schools into fortresses against violence before we even attempt to address the root causes of violence in communities.
What can we do?
Part of the takeaway here is that guns— like so many other problems facing schools— are not really a problem schools can solve, nor should they be expected to solve it. While research points towards strategies that might mitigate the number of guns that find their ways into schools— especially the kinds of facilities upgrades that make it harder for unauthorized individuals to enter school buildings, and which are hard for many schools to implement given inadequate funding— whatever is in the community will ultimately find its way into schools.
After all, we can’t even keep contraband out of prisons, and schools are not— or at least should not be— prisons. (According to a brief from the National Institute of Justice, drones alone accounted for 130 incidents in which contraband— including weapons— was smuggled into federal prisons between 2015 and 2019 federal prisons reported 130 drone incidents, although the brief pointed out that this is probably a low estimate.)
American communities are, statistically, awash in a sea of firearms, and as the number of those firearms ultimately washing up in our schools attests, many of them are unsecured and easily accessible to children of all ages. According to the Journal of the American Medical Association: Pediatrics, in a study of school shooting incidents, “A majority of the firearms were procured from the perpetrator’s family or relatives or from friends or acquaintances.”
TASSS also concluded that, “Collectively, these findings imply that a large number of school shootings are actually non-school related. These shootings may represent community violence generally that is spilling onto the school grounds. Thus, there may be a need for additional initiatives, (such as school and community partnerships to address wider social problems), besides those geared to the school classrooms, and hallways when school is in session (like metal detectors, school resource officers).”
South Carolina, according to a 2020 RAND report, has a higher share of gun ownership than any of its immediately neighboring states. Unsurprisingly, only its Southeastern neighbors with a higher rate of gun ownership— states like Alabama and Mississippi— see a higher number of gun deaths. While anti-regulation groups spend a huge amount of time and money trying to convince us otherwise, where there are more guns, there simply are more gun deaths. The idea that reducing requirements to learn how to safely handle guns, or to secure them, will not cause more gun deaths and injuries, seems ridiculous.
Unless we find ways to reduce the number of unsecured firearms and take them out of the hands of people who have demonstrated they are likely to commit a violent crime with those guns, it seems like we’re doomed to play a waiting game of counting up the guns and praying they don’t go off and harm or kill children and/ or school employees.
The law in South Carolina and other states does not make this easy. After all, firearms are not generally secure when they are being carried openly and stored haphazardly. For example, the number of guns stolen from cars in the US has tripled in recent years, and certainly laws like South Carolina’s which invite guns to be stored in cars— including in otherwise restricted areas, like schools— will not make it less likely for guns to be stolen from cars. Indeed, publicly-available data shows a slight increase in incidents where guns were found in cars on school campuses in South Carolina since the passage of the open carry law, but it’s unclear if we’ll hear much about these types of incidents now, because with the signing of the permitless carry bill, people leaving guns in cars parked outside of our schools will not necessarily be breaking the law.
This is a complex issues without easy solutions, but it’s important that we at least start to implement what we do know works— securing guns, removing them from the hands of people who pose a known danger to the public, and making common-sense upgrades to our schools— and to roll back harmful legislation that doesn’t really aim to protect gun owners as much as to incentivize more guns everywhere all the time, including in our schools.
More Resources:
Cox, Robert. “SLED: Weapons violations up in SC, most other crimes lower in 2022”. WSPA News. November 2023.
Freilich, et al. “Understanding the Causes of School Violence Using Open Source Data” (TASSS). National Criminal Justice Reference Service. August 2021.
“How Can We Prevent Gun Violence in American Schools?” Everytown. June 2023.
Jackson, Gavin. “Gun Violence/ This Week in South Carolina.” SCETV Radio. April 2023.
Jimenez, Kayla. “Back-to-school reality: Campus shootings rose dramatically last year.” USA Today. August 2024.
K-12 School Shooting Database.
Klein et al. “Characteristics and Obtainment Methods of Firearms Used in Adolescent School Shootings”. Journal of the American Medical Association Network. November 2023.
Musa, Amanda. “Most school shootings aren’t mass killings, study finds, and they’re often driven by community violence”. CNN. November 2023.
SC Reported School Gun- and Weapon- Related Incidents (spreadsheet).
South Carolina Has History of School Shootings. Independent Mail. March 2022.