Gun violence in this country is still way too prominent.
On Monday, a teenage shooter open-fired at Central Visual and Performing Arts High School in St. Louis, leaving two people dead and many others wounded. The gunman eventually died at a hospital after a shootout with local police the morning of the shooting.
According to CNN, a teacher and a Black student were killed. The student was identified as 15-year Alexandria Bell and the teacher as 61-year-old Jean Kirk Kuckzka, who had been teaching health, personal finance and physical education at the high school for more than a decade. Bell died at the school and Kuckzka while at a local hospital.
Out of the seven victims wounded during the shooting, six of them were Black students and ranged from the ages of 15 and 16-years-old, according to CBS News.
St. Louis Police Commissioner Mike Sack shared during a press conference on Monday that the shooter was identified as 19-year-old Orlando Harris, a Black man, who graduated from the St. Louis high school last year and had no criminal history prior to this shooting. There is also still no clear motive as to why he decided to carry out this malicious act.
Sack later said during the press conference, “The individual had almost a dozen 30-round, high-capacity magazines on him. So that’s a whole lot of victims there. But because of the quick response, that suspect didn’t have the opportunity to turn this into — it’s certainly tragic for the families, it’s tragic for the community, but it could have been a whole lot worse.”
More from CBS News:
The shooting just after 9 a.m. at Central Visual and Performing Arts High School forced students to barricade doors and huddle in classroom corners, jump from windows and run out of the building to seek safety.
Adams said seven security guards were in the school at the time, each at an entry point of the locked building. One of the guards noticed the man was trying to get in at a locked door, but couldn’t. The guard notified school officials and ensured that police were contacted, Sack said.
This year alone, there have been 40 school shootings that have resulted in deaths or injuries, the most since Education Week started tracking these kinds of incidents in 2018. This doesn’t even include the dozens of other mass shootings that aren’t categorized as “school shootings.”
This can be attributed to the light gun laws that are in place in states across this country, most notably in Missouri. According to Everytown.org, “Missouri has no law requiring background checks on unlicensed gun sales. State law also allows people to carry hidden, loaded handguns in public without a permit or safety training. Missouri has no laws prohibiting domestic abusers from possessing guns.”
Basically, anyone who wants a gun can get one.
These occurrences are not outliers; they happen way too often for people in this country not to care and to pass it off as “just another day in the U.S.”