Black and Latino Students Are More Likely to Be Killed in School Shootings

One week before the mass shooting at the Covenant School in Nashville, a mother in Arlington, Texas, did exactly what parents at the Nashville school would do: She dropped off her kid for what she expected to be another normal day. But less than 10 minutes later, her phone rang. Her boy, the caller said, had been shot on the steps outside the school.

Two hours later, her son, 16-year-old Ja’Shawn Poirier, was dead.

Police say a 15-year-old fellow student at Lamar High School had shot at a group of students with a long gun in the fourth fatal shooting on a high school campus so far this year. {snip}

{snip}

In 2023, eight students and three staff members have been shot to death in schools serving kids in kindergarten through 12th grade, according to data collected by David Riedman of the K-12 School Shooting Database. Of those eight students, five were Black boys in high school. All attended underresourced schools in low-income neighborhoods.

{snip}

A BuzzFeed News analysis found that half of students and teachers killed on campus in the 10 years since Sandy Hook in 2013 were Black or Latino. Research by the advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety found that, in instances in which it was able to identify the racial composition of the school, 2 in 3 shootings in the US occurred in majority-minority schools.

“Far too often we’re not outraged enough as a nation about the fact that school shootings disproportionately impact Black and brown kids,” said Angela Ferrell-Zabala, senior vice president of movement building at Everytown for Gun Safety. {snip}

{snip}